Adobe MAX Miami 2024

I was lucky enough to be invited back to the world’s biggest design conference as a headline speaker this year, and boy… what a whirlwind.

After a brutal jet-lag experience last year, I learned from my lesson and set off early for Miami, sleeping pills at hand and made the 9000 mile trip from Australia ahead of the conference.

This year Adobe hosted 10,000 attendees at the Miami Beach Convention Centre for three days of keynotes, speaker sessions, labs and a chance to hang out with everyone on the Creative Park Floor.

After the success of my 15-minute slot at the end of the Graphic Design Super Session last year, I was given my own room in 2024 and a full hour to entertain an audience of ~500 people! My speech was titled, ‘See One, Do One, Teach One’ and it was based around the ‘learn by teaching’ theme, and sharing what you know to build up our industry. You can watch the session in full here.

Once I was done I ran over to the Creative Theatre to sit with Kristy Campbell for our Q&A on ‘Harnessing the Power of Social Media’.

I’ll never get over what a spectacle this event is. From the sheer number of attendees, to the fantastic connections you build, to the inevitable sticker haul (stickers are currency), Adobe MAX never fails to impress me. And as someone who spends their time in a tiny home studio on the other side of the world, this event is the one time of the year that I feel like somewhat of a celebrity. It’s a strange experience (there was a line to meet me at the end of my speech) and something I’ll never quite get over.

Here’s a wrap up video, including getting to hang out with all of the keynote speakers, bumping into the likes of Aaron Draplin, Clark Orr, Colin and Samir, Chris Do and many more absolute legends from our creative world —>

My biggest interview yet!

Boy I was nervous for this one…

Once again, I was privileged enough to get to sit down and chat with one of my heroes in the field. If you don’t know Chris Do, he’s a former agency owner and the founder of a group called The Futur; an enterprise that strives to educate designers and creatives on how to make the most out of their careers.

As a designer and a freelancer, I was never taught the business side of the creative industry. So in the infancy of my small business, I looked to Chris for the answers. His content was one of the main reasons I decided to niche down into logo design.

This was a full circle moment for me. I’ve been lucky enough to meet Chris in person a couple of times, and let’s be honest, he’s an intimidating guy. And his podcast is one of the most listened-to titles in the marketing space. So I was extremely nervous during this interview. And you can tell because Chris was able to convince me to share some specifics around the financials of my business.

Check out the interview in full on Youtube here…

Adobe MAX London 2024

I was lucky enough to be invited back to my old stomping ground for Adobe MAX London, where I ran a live stream with the Adobe Live team.

Fresh off the stage from the keynote, Michael Fugoso hosted our session, titled Speed Up Your Editing with AI in Premiere Pro.

In this session we focussed on the brand new editing features inside the Beta release of Premiere Pro, including working with some of the AI editing capabilities (not generative AI, that hadn’t been released yet!).

Here we looked at the new enhance speech feature, the remix tool, editing your video via the automatically generated transcript and more!

I was also invited to a pre-event summit where I was lucky enough to try out an advanced copy of the new Photoshop! Here’s a recap of this whirlwind trip…

Branders Magazine: Cover Star!

[Mike Wazowski voice] “I’m on the cover of a magazine!”

I was lucky enough to be featured on the cover of the December 2023 issue of Branders Magazine, an online and printed publication focussing on branding, design, strategy and innovation. Former cover stars include Chris Do and Debbie Millman, so yes, my imposter syndrome is definitely kicking in!

Inside the mag is a 10-page spread with an interview from yours truly, plus an article I wrote for the publication titled; Logo Design is the Purest Form of Design. Change My Mind.

Read the issue in full here

My interview with Design Cuts

The lovely Tom Ross from Design Cuts interviewed me this week live on his channel. If you’re into logo design, case studies on logo design, how to win clients as a logo designer, then this interview is for you.

Check out the video in full here, but watch it quick because the replay for this session will be available until November 20th 2023.

Adobe MAX 2023 Wrap-up

Now that I am back home from my trip to LA for Adobe MAX 2023, I thought it might be nice to write a little wrap-up of everything that went down while it’s all still fresh in my mind. It was an absolute whirlwind and an experience I will never forget, and quite frankly a massive success all round.

I was fortunate enough to be booked for two talks on the first day of the conference, so I arrived a couple of days early to try and get settled, meet the rest of the team, film some pre-event content for Adobe and attend rehearsals so we could iron out some kinks.

The first talk was the big one. I had the last 15 minutes of the Graphic Design ‘Super Session’ to present my ‘lecture’; Signed Off, No Amends: How to achieve the holy grail of feedback. This whole session was a melting pot of five speakers, all leaders in their fields and included everything from pro software tips, inspiring creative ideas and practical tips to create inspiring work. It was incredibly fast-paced with high energy, so we’d had a lot of meetings about the structure of this session and how it would flow.

During my rehearsal the previous day Chris Do had snuck into the room and ended sitting in the front row directly in front of me to watch my talk. This was beyond nerve-wracking, but I’m so glad it happened, because Chris ended up giving me advice which massively improved my delivery. In short, he told me I was reading too much from my notes, rather than addressing the crowd. Obviously it was hard to do this in rehearsal in front of a few people, but this advice helped so much, and those who had seen the rehearsal told me that I had improved dramatically for the ‘live’ version.

Watch the entire Super Session here. If you want to watch my talk, skip to 42:00, but I urge you not to as there is some great content from my co-hosts.

Once the talk was done, I had a mad dash to the Creative Park to meet up with Kristy Campbell for our live Q&A, Agency vs Freelance.

Unfortunately this wasn’t filmed, which is a real shame as chatting to Kristy was/is an absolute pleasure. She had loads of insights for me, and we got into it a little bit. As someone who is at a bit of an inflection point in their business, her insights were hugely helpful.

And in all honestly, I was so amped up from the previous session and how well it had gone that I was a little jittery and struggling to settle myself during the chat. Kristy absolutely saved it and as we went into questions from the audience I had calmed down a bit and got into the flow.

Once this session was done, my obligations as a speaker were over for the rest of the conference. This meant I could enjoy myself, attend any sessions I wanted and explore the floor.

I attended Chris Do’s talk that evening and ended up sitting next to the one-and-only James Martin (@made.by.james). It was so great to finally meet him in person and I later managed to sit next to him at dinner and chewed his ear off for an hour. What a guy.

I could honestly go into so much detail about everything that went down. From meeting Aaron Draplin (and getting a little emotional), to hanging out with team Adobe, and meeting some absoolute heroes in the design industry (and dancing the night away with them), I had an absolute blast.

Fingers crossed they have me back next year!