Adobe Creative Meetup London left us intrigued, excited, and inspired

As we stomped through the puddles on Great Portland Street on the kind of drizzly evening that sends central London back into a vision of a romanticised 1950s, the It’s Nice That team were desperate for innovation and invention. A glass of mulled wine wouldn’t have gone amiss either.

While the drink options were of the slightly more chilled variety, last week’s Adobe Creative Meetup gave us invention and innovation in spades.

Following on from October’s annual Adobe MAX Creativity Conference in Los Angeles, the event — which took place in the glorious confines of the rather opulent and ornate One Marylebone building — gave some of the UK’s most creative minds a chance to check out the forthcoming Adobe Creative Cloud features that’ll change their lives in the year to come.

The evening’s first speaker has one of the most unusual, and best, job titles around. When Rufus Deuchler meets new people at parties, he gets to tell them — with a straight face, presumably — that he is “Principal Manager of Creative Cloud Evangelism at Adobe.”

The evangelist talked us through a slew of additions to Creative Cloud and gave the assembled audience the skinny on some entirely new apps, such as Adobe Rush and Project Aero. All of which are, as Rufus says, adapted for a world where “creativity is more possible than ever.”

It seems like Adobe is going to go big on AI in 2019. 74% of creatives, we were told, spend 50% of their time on repetitive and non-creative tasks – the exact kind of tasks that Adobe Sensei will do for you, allowing you to “work faster, unleash creativity, and create anything."

In addition to the AI implementations that will “liberate your creativity”, Rufus ran the enthralled crowd through Premiere Rush CC (a cross-device video capturing, editing, and publishing app), the iPad-friendly adaptation of Photoshop CC, and Project Gemini – which will combine Illustrator’s draw function with Photoshop’s sketching tools for one super-dynamic system.

In short, Rufus reaffirmed what we already knew about Adobe Creative Cloud – it is built by creatives for creatives.

After a brief interval — with just enough time to get our hands on another mini serving of merguez and a glass of something chilled — we were graced by Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, better known as design duo MinaLima.

The pair outlined their commitment to telling stories through graphic design, talking us through how they came to shape the look and feel of the Harry Potter™ movies, as well as their more recent work on the Fantastic Beasts™ series.

They explained how they pre-dated the Adobe Creative Cloud experience, and that for them, cutting and pasting really did involve scissors, glue, and photocopiers. Despite now being fully embedded in the digital realm they still use each method to complement the other. “They couldn’t exist without each other,” Miraphora says.

It was a talk with a message: producing graphic design for films is a viable career option. Noting how when they started work on the first of the Harry Potter™ movies back at the turn of the millennium, there were “about four people doing it,” there is now 250 or so creatives making a living from it. MinaLima even set up a union for them.

MinaLima ended their all-too-brief chat with some words of wisdom. “Find what makes you tick,” they said, “and even if it is a weird thing, stick with it.” Hear hear.

The evening’s final speaker was lifestyle vlogger Patricia Bright, one of the UK’s biggest YouTubers. Chatting to Adobe’s own Simon Morris, Patricia ran us through how Adobe Premiere Rush CC helped her up her video game.

“I use it on my mobile,” she says, “I’m not a professional; I’m self-taught. I was a bit lazy but now I’ve got more technical.”

As the evening drew to a close, the crowd slipped out into the rainy night, heads full of creative ideas, ready for a new year, and the possibilities it brings.

Watch the incredible speaker sessions on-demand now.