MAX SESSIONS All right. Welcome, everybody. Good to have you in our very first Super Session for graphic designers. How's everyone doing? Good? So excited to have you here. Our very first Graphic Design Super Session, probably the largest session here, so this is super fun. My name is Paul Trani, Evangelist for Adobe, your host for this very first session.

You know, we can talk about what a Super Session is. So basically, we realize sometimes there are so many good sessions going on at one time and you have FOMO, you're like, "Oh, I can't go to this, and blah, blah, blah." You know what? Let's have a Super Session, cram a bunch of stuff in here and throw it at you. It's the plan, okay? So it's going to come at you fast. It's being also live-streamed, so available later. So don't worry about catching every single thing. So, yeah, that's what we're doing. We contacted some of our favorite designers, but since they couldn't show up, we got four other people. I'm kidding. These are amazing people. Love these guys. It's like I'm just so touched that they are here. Amazing individuals, Kelsey, Anna, Magdiel, James and, yeah, they're excited to share with you. And we're all on the same page with sessions all about graphic design. We're going to hit all the various apps, sort of Illustrator, there are some Express, Photoshop, some AI stuff, and of course, finish up with some insights and tips and tricks, just kind of taking a higher level view at things. So, that is the plan. And we thought we'd could pick a coffee shop theme or whatever, like, "No, let's go intergalactic." That's what we decided to do, some planetary tourism because sometimes you need to escape. So that is the plan with our Intergalactic Tourism Board that we just formed about a month or so ago. So, that is the plan. Enough about all of this. Let's kick this off with our first presenter. You might know her from social media. She regularly posts her design wisdom and tips and tutorials on social media, TikTok. We're so impressed with her and her talent and wisdom at such a young age. She impresses me. We actually had to hire her as an Evangelist. So, everybody please give a warm welcome for Kelsey Slay.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Paul, for that amazing introduction. I'm so, so excited to be here with you guys today and show you some amazing features in Adobe Illustrator. Clap if you would agree. It's an amazing time to be an Illustrator user. Wasn't that keynote absolutely amazing. So, yeah, let's go ahead and hop right in. So, me and Paul have actually been challenged with this project brief from the Intergalactic Tourism Board. Now, this logo was created by the one and only James Barnard. Absolutely amazing. But we've been challenged to create a brand identity centered around the planet Vectora. We also need to create a poster for the new tour of this planet, and the direction is going to be a retro '50s vibe to build trust and reference a simpler time. We really want to convey a sense of adventure that's family focused and exciting. So, I'm going to go ahead and start working on this brand direction. I went ahead and started kind of creating this mood board here. It's a work in progress, so no judgment. Trust the process. But as you can see, I have images of the planet, even the planet surface, plant life that lives on this planet and even these amazing creatures. So, all of these images were generated in Adobe Firefly. And I 100% recommend using Firefly when you're creating projects for imaginary worlds. I'm able to really create this whole brand identity by using these images and kind of create more of a vibe and mood board and kind of a mood for this brand. So, as you can see, I have a color palette that I'm kind of thinking is the direction we should go since I'm creating this brand direction and I'll have the amazing Paul Trani, create my poster. I even brought in some design examples. But as you can see, the design examples I brought in, the colors are wildly throwing off my mood board, and as a perfectionist at heart, I wanted to all be super cohesive and I wanted to flow. So let me show you how you can easily recolor things in just a matter of a few clicks. So I'm going to go ahead and select all of my posters and I'm going to go up to Edit. We're going to go down to Edit Colors, and then I'm going to go to Generative Recolor. Now, you've probably seen this panel before, but I'm going to go ahead and write in my prompt. I'm going to do Muted colors with orange. And here is actually a pro tip, you can add in your own color palettes to in here to kind of guide Generative Recolor to use some of these colors and even give you color palette similar. So I'm going to add in that color palette that I had originally on my mood board because I want this to be in a similar vibe and even maybe use some of these colors. So, once we get this loaded up, we're going to hit Generate, and we're going to get four different variations. So, after some awkward moments of silence, we're going to get some generations. And here, this is already looking so much better for my mood board. This is so cohesive with my mood board. And it's even kind of giving me some similar too. And I actually really like the first one. And as you can see, I could edit this more if I wanted to fine tune it. But I think for now this is perfect. So, show of hands, how many people here have ever outlined a font and completely forgot what the font name was? Everyone's hands up, we're all the same. How many people have ever seen a beautiful font out in the wild and you're wondering, "Man, what's that font? I want to use it for my project"? Yeah, all of us. I have countless images in my Camera Roll of just design inspiration. So, let me introduce you to Retype. So, I'm going to select these posters as well, and I'm going to go over to Retype and hit Enter. Now, Illustrator is actually going to scan in my inspiration and give me font suggestions based off of my poster. So, I'm already looking really good here with all these font suggestions. And as a font hoarder and someone who collects fonts like candy, this is my favorite tool ever. But I really actually like... this one's a really good font as well but I really, really like this font and I really think this is the direction that me and Paul should go with for our poster. So as you can see, I can activate it directly in my Adobe Fonts and I can even favorite it if I want to come back to it. Or maybe this is not something I want to do right now, but I'm going to actually, I already have it activated. And let me show you. So, this font is completely outlined. it's Vector, it's not even a font, but I can apply this font to that font and then I can actually edit it after a million clicks.

There we go. I can actually edit it and change it just like that in a matter of a few clicks. Absolutely amazing. Clap if you think that's amazing. You can clap. You can clap. So next up, I can even apply like that in a matter of a click. Because I want Paul to use this font, I'm going to be a little controlling art director and tell him that this is the font we're using. Now, I'm actually going to add this into my Libraries. If you're not used to using Libraries with collaborative projects, it's such a missed opportunity. I did not use Libraries for the longest time. I'm not ashamed to admit that. But when I started using them for my collaboration projects, it tremendously sped up my workflow because I wasn't sitting here having to constantly go through my email or say, "Hey, what was that font? Hey, what is the color palette?" I can just share this Library directly with Paul and he can have it on file and he won't pester me in my email. So next up, as you can see, my mood board, you know, previously I had some spots that I really wanted to fill, and I really want to create and generate some Vectors. And you've seen this in the keynote. I wanted to generate some Vectors for my mood board because I want Paul to kind of have a strong idea of what we need to create, and I want him to recreate the Vectors in his own way and make me proud with his poster. So, I'm going to go ahead and show Text to Vector. Now, as you can see, there are Subjects, Scene, Icon, Pattern. I'm going to go with Subject, and we're actually going to just go ahead and do a simple, simple prompt. We're just going to do Space ship and I want it to be a rocket. So, once this generates, we will have three different variations that are all Vector-based that you can completely edit.

And after a few moments of awkward silence as it loads up for me, we will have three different rockets to choose from. So, this is already looking really amazing. In just a few clicks I've been able to create this, but as you can see, I'm running into the same issue is that it doesn't match my mood board at all. And I don't want to have to sit here and recolor this and I don't really want to beef up my prompt. I just am trying to create this fast to get this poster out. So, I'm going to actually reference this poster that me and Paul also collaborated on for a different planet. So, this poster, as you can see, we want to keep the brand identity cohesive with the Tourism Board, the previous work that we've done for the Tourism Board. So, I'm going to go ahead and go back to Text to Vector, turn on active artboard styles, and I'm going to go ahead and do the Style Picker. So, once I get that, I'm going to go ahead and keep my prompt the same and I'm going to hit Generate again. Now, I love this because sometimes, you know, we have to constantly put in different prompting and try to find the right words. And sometimes it's really hard to kind of nail the exact style you want to do in prompting. So by style selecting, I'm already generating stuff that looks way more similar and flows way more with my mood board in just a matter of a few clicks. Now, I wanted to... Yeah, clap, it's amazing. This is so amazing. I saw this feature as someone who works at Adobe, I saw this feature in its baby form and it's so amazing to see how it's evolved and changed and how great it is and I'm so happy everyone knows about it, so I don't want to keep it a secret anymore. So, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and generate one more thing because what's a poster without an astronaut? So, let's do retro... It's so hard to spell up here when you're anxious. I'm not even going to lie. Retro astronaut floating in space. Don't mind my spelling, With an orange suit.

All right. Let's go ahead and Generate. So, I have my Style Picker still and I have my Active Artboard Style. So, hopefully, we will get an amazing astronaut that Paul can reference because I definitely want him to use this in the ideation phase for him to create my poster and make me proud as his art director. So once this generates, we're so close. Let's see, a little moment. Okay, there we go. So, he's a little short. I don't think I want to use him. He looks like a little kid. But this is actually really good. So we did get this one. And even if you hold this over, you can kind of see how it flows with that poster. That's absolutely amazing that it's just doing this. So anyways, here we have two different generations that I want Paul to kind of reference these and create my own. So, let's go ahead and go to the final product. So, here is the final mood board. And as an art director, I think I did a decent job of nailing out some of these things, so that Paul can create me an amazing poster. So I have some Vectors and have all my Firefly images, I have my recolor posters, as well as a color palette, and I feel like we're looking really good to get this poster going. And like I referenced the Libraries before, I've even gone ahead and added some of these graphics, so that Paul has them directly in his Library and he doesn't have to pester me in my email asking me, "Where was that Vector?" He has it right here for him. So, lastly, I'm going to show Share for review. And if you're not using Share for review, you are missing out on opportunity. It is also one of my favorite features. We're going to go up to Share, this blue button right here, and I'm actually going to create a link that I can give directly to Paul. So, this helps me so much because I don't like long email threads, and so I can just share this link directly with Paul and he has full access to this file and I don't have to go through an email or he doesn't have to lose all my files and anything like that. So let's go ahead and go to the browser and go ahead and click this. And so this will be Paul's preview of all the amazing work that I did as art director. So, here he will have the brief, he will have the posters and even the Vector inspiration as well as the final mood board. And I'm actually going to leave a comment right here and say, "Let me know if you have any questions." Typing is hard up here. "Here is the art direction." I type faster when I'm not on stage. Submit.

And just like that, I think as an art director, Clap if you agree. I think as an art director, I did a decent job of getting Paul. So with that being said, I'm going to call the amazing Paul Trani up to the stage to create me my poster, and hopefully he does me all right. Thanks, boss. -Yeah, the roles are flipped today. -I know. -I'm your boss today. -You are. And I love it. So, yeah, perfect. So, if we could switch to my screen, I just hit refresh. I don't know why I felt like I needed a refresh. She sent me that link that was already updated, so we could literally carry on a conversation on it, you know... -Even at the stage. -That's right. You are on it. I am on it. My boss is right here. I'm going to watch you define this over your shoulder. -No pressure. -No pressure. Okay. Hiding this and jumping into this. So, she already created some things. Here I'm back in Illustrator. We've seen her generate some prompts. I'm just going to go over some quick pro tips in here. Essentially, you could also just have your colors right here. So, sometimes I'll have the prompt derive what it creates, or I'll even say, "Hey, use the Active Artboard and just steal those colors." So you don't have to go through a recolor process, which is helpful. -So that's what I've done. -I love that tip. Yeah. And I'll show you more, wait for it. If we jump over, I've generated lots of astronauts based on her art direction... Okay, and dogs. I love dogs. -Cute dogs. -Okay. I'm appealing to her being a dog lover. And at this point, we could take this and go a step further. But usually your intention is like, "Okay, I need to save every little generation that I make on an Artboard." You would think that. Actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to Text to Vector Graphic. There is a separate panel for it, which is really helpful to use. And if you take a look in here, it's nice that it's expandable. We can actually see everything that's generated and there's no need to have everything on the Artboard. Wow, you love this feature. You've been playing with it a lot. I have. This is the thing. It's like an Illustrator file within an Illustrator file, or Illustrator files. So, these are already ready to go. You know, we could drop them in and start using them. So, be mindful of that. You never lose things just because you delete them. Go to this panel. Use this panel. And there's also a detail slider as you get into it. Last tip, really fast as we take a look at... you know, I just need to generate some landscapes. There's lots of landscapes here. Let's turn those off. We can kind of move this off to the side and we will change this to Scene and we'll select this graphic. So lots of times things come in as like a square. You saw most of Kelsey's stuff come in as a square, but at this point you can type in some alien landscape. -Aliens are on trends for this year. -Alien... Yeah, I guess so. Let's run it. I have that graphic selected too many times. If you have a graphic selected, it's going to replace it. But you could also use that to say, "Hey, I want a landscape. I want a portrait." As tall or as wide as you want, it'll generate that size. So, be mindful of that. -And there we are. -Right. That's kind of beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, you can clap. You can clap. Also, can we all agree, she used this feature as a starting point for the mood board? It's my job to go in, clean this up best I can. Maybe it makes it into the final. Maybe it's just used for brainstorming. It's kind of up to you. You could literally use this just to, yeah, just brainstorm ideas. Well, you know, as a starting point. So, it's not... otherwise I generate what I want, just like I have in here with these little dogs. And let's kind of roll even into some another... Let's take this little guy. This is the one I ended up using. We'll just copy it. -I approve of that as art director... -It's adorable. -...watching over your shoulder. -Right. Jumping in here, pasting this as a smart object into Photoshop. -It's too cute. -It is cute. Also, another key point with Firefly. This has changed, as Kelsey has said, over time. It's amazing what you create today, you might use that same prompt, you might not get that tomorrow. I swear to God, it's going to be better. -It's amazing. -Every second it gets better. Every day it gets better. So, that's one thing with AI technology, it's hard to generate the exact same thing every single time, but it will change over time as we get, you know, Firefly upgraded or whatever as it... -Adobe upgrades. -Yeah, Adobe upgrades. So, here we are. Paste this in here, add a little texture. I've already done that. So that's already right here. In fact, let's just take... let's actually turn this off. I've already added a little texture to this guy using a brush. You are getting fancy with the texture. That's why I brought it into Photoshop just like that. Now, I'm going to go into Express. So I'll take a lot of this content. I know I use the shortcut key. I'll convert everything to like a smart object and I'll just clean up my layers, but not too much. I don't need to worry about the layer name. As you can tell, I hardly worry about the layer name at all. Right. You're like, "You didn't, to begin with." I can't judge you. I don't name anything. There we go. -It's just final, final three file... -Yeah. -Everything final, final. -I think I like this one. Yeah. -...on my computer. -Yeah.

So, there that is. -Okay, right. -Hopefully, some surprises there. -Yeah. -The bills were due. -Yeah. -You are showing up and showing out. -I love it. -Yeah. And here's where we're going to take things to the next level again. We'll just drop this in here. I did this earlier on stage with an Illustrator file. Here I am in Express with a PSD file, so, also PDF, whatever the case may be. I personally like PSDs where I'll just make smart objects. That way that smart object, I could edit that smart object in Illustrator too. So, that's just how I work. And let's take a look at this, we'll load in. Basically as expected, we could see everything good to go. All right. Even they have that spare dog. I mean, sorry. Sorry, buddy. Wow, you just deleted the dog. That went from really cute to really scary. -A huge floating dog in this... -We can't have two dogs? So scary. You could have two dogs. Okay, next up. Pro tips, that's why we're here. I've already shown animation and we could do like a bob with this planet. Just did a quick bob. It's doing its thing. So, that's one animation. But pro tip is, you can actually take really multiple objects and I'm just shift selecting everything, group them together. Now, that's one new object. And then from there, I'll add the animation of it growing in. -Wow. -So, see how it does that? -That's amazing. -It's nesting animations. You would think you did that in After Effects. I know. I don't even know After Effects. -Yeah. And you put After Effects... -You don't know that. on your resume. You don't know that. Maybe I will, I don't know. Tell me to do something really advanced. Because let's be honest, this is for quick and easy project. -Just for funsies. -Yeah, exactly. Because you kind of wonder, our projects in the future. Let's take these two. This time I'm just gonna go with these really fast. Same thing. We'll have this dog bob up and down, selecting it right in there. And we'll make this really fast because I'm going to move on to the next tip. But first, let's have him do his thing. All right. Zoom out. Adorable. Selecting all this content right down here, except for that title, except for maybe that background. Selecting everything, and you can select multiple objects. This is brand new as of yesterday. -Wow. -Yesterday. So, that's one thing. It is a sort of a web-based app. They constantly update it with new features. It's like little surprises we have in here. So, at this point, we're going to animate this in. It's going to drift in from the bottom. It's going to go up, and it just has that nice depth that way. Just when I think you're about to be done. -Yeah. -You just do something else. -I'm just getting started. -Yeah. -You wait, you wait, boss. -Yeah. -You get a raise. -I do.

All right. So, next thing, we don't want everything thrown at you at the exact same time. So, right down here, "Show layer timing," turn that on. We want that big planet to come in later. And, oh, thank you very much, it has the... I can actually see what I haven't seen a layer name. I don't have to reference a layer name. I get the image, which is what I like. We're all visual learners. We can see it right there. Now, that's what I did. That comes in later. And I can start to time this out any way I want based on what I have selected. Vectora, come in later. What's happening over here? We could start to see all these little dots. Oh, what is this? Oh, that's my planet. Oh, what's this? That is... that's actually the title art, too. So there I'm able to, kind of, paste this out, have everything come in when I want and have it... Wow! That's amazing.

-You like it? -Yeah. -You like that? -I think you design better with me over your shoulder. -I think it's my energy... -Please, God, no. ...transferring to you. So much pressure. All right. So we've done a lot here. Easy to animate, right? We can impress our bosses. I'm going to actually go a little bit further with this, because I've shown this as well, and I just want to drive this home, just the fact that I can jump in and search for any video content, right? I just did some hyperspace. Wow. Oh, my gosh. I thought you were done. -Yeah. Do you want me... -Let's go. -[inaudible] -Do I need to get off the stage? -You have to get that paycheck. -I do. All right. So we'll take that because she was just expecting a poster. But this is the future, and I'm thinking, "You know what? -We need to go beyond the static." -It's fancy with that. We'll push that back there. We want to do a little blend mode. I'm begging for more blend modes internally, by the way, so Screen, we can change that to Screen and... Clap if you want more blend modes. Yes, this is being recorded. -Please, team, more blend modes. -It's recorded, Adobe. -More blend modes. -More blend modes. We have that doing its thing for its length. -We will take this video back. -We will. They clapped for us, so we have to do it. -Yeah, we have to do it now. -Wow. -So there that is. -That's so cool. -But wait, there's more. -No. I'm not done yet. I know you want me to leave. We're going to be here all day. -Paul Trani is designing. -We are? Can I do one thing? Real fast. Grabbing something right here. Dropping it in. This is a case where I'm dropping it into the timeline. We could see it here and we could see it play through. Right. Our stuff, we talked about the brand library, which I'll change right now. Really, you could have all your projects over here, and it's just a matter of locating the one you want and stealing those assets and moving things around. So, at this point, we do have James's logo, right? We'll drop that in. He worked on this. It is linked, so if he did a sneaky little tweak, right, it's going to update in here and I'm going to know, because it's going to say "Update". So you're not that tricky. You can't sneak around us, James. We'll know. But I'm going to end with... I'm not sure how we're doing. Yeah, we're doing great. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and take this one more time. This actually, I'm going to fast forward to the final. This is the final version where I've done some trimming. -Wow. And audio. -And what...

Audio!

You can find that right here. Do a search. Drop it in. It's all licensed. You're not going to see a watermark or any of that. You just drop it in. You have it here. And what else did we do? Since I was so excited about dropping in the audio, animation and video, I shared it with my boss, and now we're collaborating. -Right? -Now I can change anything I want. Check it out. Do you see? Go ahead and change some stuff, like, make... Yeah, I think I know you did a great job. Like, I will sign the paycheck, but I think that I want to add in my little astronaut man here, because I'm emotionally attached to him at this point. So we're going to make him a little smaller and I'm going to do a signature Paul Trani move and go to what is it, Bob? -This is your favorite. -Might as well change my name. Yeah, there we go. And then boom. Just like that, easy collaboration. I love... actually, I don't know if it was moving on the big screen, but we want to hear that audio. We'll just close out with this.

You feel it? -Is the vibes vibing? -Is the vibe going? Was it easy or was it easy? Because those are your two choices. And there's her work.

Kelsey Slay, everybody.

Paul Trani, everyone. -Thank you. -Thank you, guys.

All right. We'll pause that. Thank you so much. So, recap. Recolor Art, Retype. Hopefully you're using... Retype is going to get used a lot. I know I will personally. Text to Vector, Libraries, Share for Review. This is a recap of everything we went through. One thing I didn't touch on is Remove Video Background. I could drop in a video if I wanted to get rid of, if I had an actual video of an astronaut, I can remove that background. Audio and Collaboration. So, moving on to our next segment. So we decided to outsource it. I know I think I did a pretty good job, but we're going to have some more people create promotional content. So, our next speaker you might have recognized from this morning in the keynote. She's award-winning Photoshop artist, photographer, designer, professional traveler. She spent a year traveling around in a van. So, dedication to her craft, taking photos, doing art. Please welcome our design evangelist, Anna McNaught.

Hi, everyone. All right, let me wake my computer up here. We are good to go.

Perfect. Thank you all for being here. I'm so excited to be a part of the Super Session and share some fun intergalactic travel and some astronauts. So this is my mood board. I had this idea for kind of a nature-y based planet with some cool mountains and flowers. And Magdiel, who you'll see from shortly, we talked about doing some giant flowers and an astronaut in the scene. As you can see, this is very on-brand for me. If you've seen my work, I love pinks and blues and purples. So this is kind of my starting point. And now let's just hop over to Firefly. So I was working on some astronauts looking out over a magical and cosmic valley and mountains. Now, this is pretty cool, but it's not quite what I was looking for. And when I'm generating ideas, I try to get as close to my mood board or the look that I'm wanting to create. Well, as you saw in the keynote today, there's a bunch of different things we can do to change this. Let's just switch this to art and generate. Now we have the different aspect ratios. I already put this into portrait mode. I like to kind of start there and work from that mode. You know, we're all kind of trained on the Instagram 4x5. I can't break myself out of it. Is anyone else with me? Like, we're stuck in that vertical mode, right? Okay, so this is super cool. I love this. It's like very kind of vector-y. I would absolutely use this for a project, maybe go ahead and download this, save it for something else, but it's still not quite the look that we're going for. So we have the option here to add in our own image that we have the rights to use. We also can increase the intensity and all that. We'll get into that in a few minutes. But first, I want to show you all of these different effects. Look at this. There are so many. Okay. So we're going to go Cyberpunk. We're going to go Synthwave. These are some ones that I know that I like to use. So go ahead and choose whatever you want. Digital Art. Of course, my favorite, Psychedelic Wonderland. That is cool. Okay, so let's generate that as we keep looking through all these other ones. Look at this, on and on and on and on. We have so many styles, you cannot go wrong with this. We can just keep adding. Okay, yeah, that looks good. We can add that to our inspiration. You know, download these for some projects. Look at this. We get our Promoting transparency in AI. Thank you, Adobe. That's awesome. So we'll just download that. We get our Content Credentials applied but, you know, not done yet. Want to add a few more effects. Let's do Bioluminescence. A little Neon. That's really good. We'll generate that. And look, I am still scrolling on these different styles. We have, like, Line Art and Painting and Chaotic. So I'll just keep talking about these styles while we let this generate. Okay. Now we're really getting close to exactly where I want to be. And while I'm not using this image in the picture that we're going to be creating today, this is what gets all these ideas flowing for me and gives me a good starting point. All right. So we can also go in to the Style Match. And let's just go down. I already know that I want to use Neon here. I just want to quickly show you all this because it's incredible. Like, look at all these options that we have here, too. If you don't want to upload your own image, maybe you don't have something you want to use. We have landscape, and you saw Kelly demo this today, it's really powerful. Look at this neon astronaut. Like, this blows my mind. Okay, so again, not using this, just generating ideas. This is how I start to create a whole plethora of projects from one idea that then builds into a whole bunch more. So these are all my inspiration astronauts, and then we'll hop over into Photoshop, have a couple images from Adobe Stock, and we're just going to generate some rocks down here. Now, I was playing around with a couple different things. I had a field of flowers, I had some rocks. But what I noticed here is how well Generative Fill is matching the exact style of this image, as I was rehearsing. Like, look at those rocks. This is so cool. Okay. Yeah, I think that last one's perfect. You saw me do this in the keynote, I know, but, I mean, I'm still blown away by this. Are you guys, are you all blown away by this? Yeah. This is good stuff. Okay, so now I want to add in this cool sky in the background. I have this from Adobe Stock. Just a nice earthly beach scene, but we need to make it very space theme. So we're going to select this area. Contextual Task Bar. Oops, wrong layer. Got to make sure we're doing that right. Okay, there we go. Layer mask that out. Now I need to give this, like, a very space look, so we'll Radial Blur it and we can change our point here. Zoom 50%. That looks great. Kind of getting that motion, like we're in outer space. Now, we just need to blend these two together, just like you saw in the keynote. Making sure that we have a selection there, generate that and we'll just wait for that to go. Now, I like to usually make these selections a little bit bigger, so that this is really telling Generative Fill to force it up, force it out. Gorgeous blending! Look at the... like the valley that it continued on. I mean, this is so awesome, right? Yeah. Thank you.

I'm so excited about this. I know you all are, too. Like, it's incredible. Okay, so now let's see. I need to add in my astronaut. I got this super cool 3D astronaut, thanks to my brother who is in the audience. The original artist, Emanuel Sara. Thank you for modeling this for me, Evan. And he fits perfectly into my scene. So combining these mixed media pieces here to create something that is uniquely your own and still using AI as a tool. So now let's do our favorite thing that we all love, expanding this out. Doesn't matter that we have that sky overlapping in the background. Generative Fill is just still taking a look at all of this and is going to understand exactly what we want to do, you know. And that's pretty cool. So we'll just wait and...

Yeah!

These all look so good. And especially, you can see this is clearly a painting that I'm working with in the background, and Generative Fill is just getting this perfect idea here. So, I'm running out of time up here. I wanted to show you one more thing in Firefly real quick. I have these flower-sea anemone things. I was thinking adding something to the space scene would be pretty cool, so I downloaded some of those. I'll show you those in a second. Just want to point out real quick, you can hop back to Firefly 1 if you prefer that look better. Sometimes it ends up being a little bit more funky, illustrative style. You can see, here we can switch back and forth. Use this for different types of projects that you're working on, because you're going to get different results with each one, more photo-realistic with Firefly 2, more dreamy with Firefly 1. So I already added some of these flowers in here. Let's just move these out. They look pretty cool, you know, just kind of, like, placing them around the scene. We could get way more into that. We don't have enough time for that. Just want to show you quickly. Based on what Paul did, I decided to animate mine as well. Here is the final result. A little bit of dreaminess, adding, like, a sun and some stars, some mountains. I just had a lot of fun playing with this. And you can see, still stuck with that 4x5 ratio. But thanks to Generative Fill, Generative Expand, I can always change that. Thank you so much, everyone. I hope you liked this.

All right. We're going to keep it moving. Our next presenter, born in Cuba, lives in Texas. Anybody have a design crush? Kind of Magdiel is the man. I'm not ashamed to admit it. He's amazing. I have plenty. Don't worry. You're not the only one. I'm sorry about that. But nonetheless, he also runs an agency aside from being an amazing artist. Works with Artist Uprising, and also owns an agency called Belmont Creative. Please welcome Magdiel Lopez.

Thank you so much, Paul. I got to say, design crush is a little too much for me right now, but thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you to the Adobe family for having me here this year. It's an immense pleasure for me to share with you guys. Yeah, I am from Cuba, not from Texas. That's my accent. You know, don't get it mixed up, you know? I know it's hard. Everybody online, hi. Hi to my wife and my kids. I have a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old, and they might be watching me, which is great. I'm not sure they know what I'm doing but, hopefully, one day I'll make them proud. Okay, so Intergalactic Tourism Board hired me to do what I know how to do best, which is create exciting and compelling images, something that people would like to look at, you know. That's my job. So to do that, first thing you got to do is open, not Photoshop, but your notebook, and make a sketch, okay? Don't skip this part because this part is really what makes it really compelling. You want to create something that people can look at and people enjoy. So the clock is going faster today than yesterday. We rehearsed a little bit. Okay, so you want to do this. Don't skip this step. If you suck at sketching like I do, I know half of the room is judging, you can always find an anchoring image. So an Anchor image is something that you can find that's amazing. Like this one right here I found in Adobe Stock. So I brought it into my sketch. And the first thing you want to do, right after finding this image and throwing it in your sketch, is to actually start adding some structure. So, I usually typically add a structure with a Pen tool. It's a super revolutionary tool you should know about. I still love the Pen tool and I love the Shape Builder tool. So I went ahead and used all of those tools to kind of, adding the whole structure of everything I'm doing here. I was going to show you how I did that, but I don't have time, so I'm just going to turn on these layers here, so you can see it. One thing that I want to say, this is going to show you, first of all, how things actually fit in your canvas, and also it's going to show you this stock sketching because nothing lines up. But after you have that, which is a great thing, you're going to move into doing something that I love to do, and it's coloring. So, how do you get a piece to feel good and energetic? In my case, I want to reflect something that's not only conceptually make you feel like you're going through a portal, but also stylistically is reflecting an other-worldly experience. So I use a lot of color for that, typically. So I'll give you a quick color tip, because I know all of you guys are professionals in here, but something that you can do if you struggle with color is either go through the whole color wheel slowly and pick one color at a time. So you're transitioning from, like, red to purple to blue to light blue and continue. Or you can pick a zone of your color picker. So if I pick this zone right here, I'm must stay within this zone to add some color to this. In this case, I'm masking inside of my already made kind of, like, world here, and I'm going to be drawing inside of it just like this. I already did that, too, so I'm going to show you what that looks like when it's done. I'm also using the color to add some shading into it, so that it's easy for the images to be digested, right? So moving along, so I want to show you a tool that actually has to do with color that I'm really enjoying lately. And it's the Gradient tool. So, you know, the Gradient tool used to be hard to use, because it was like you go in and you have to change it and do all these things. Now you have the Gradient tool just like this. You can just scroll inside of the image. It's fantastic here, I love it. You can clap, yeah, you can do your thing. So I did that here with this cloud. I also did it with the background, which is great. And this leads me to... Oh, the astronaut's feeling a little bit out of place. So I grab another tool that's super revolutionary, not new, it's the soft brush. So I just grab a soft brush and mess with it a little bit until I got something that looked more like this and just... You know, I'm trying to fit them into the world. You don't want any of your assets to feel like they belong to different things. And that takes me to a tip that I want to share with you, is the 80-20 Rule. Every time I do work, I try to do 80% of the work in 20% of the time and then leave the final, you know, 20% of the work for 80% of the time. So I have really a lot of time to work on those small details. And that's what I did here with these flowers. So you might notice from my sketch you're missing all these wonderful flowers. That's what they look like when they're done. I'm going to walk you a little bit through my process to do this. If you can see, these are shapes. So, pretty straightforward. Pen tool, make some shapes, soft brush, paint on top of it, easy to go, you know. But this one's right here, a little bit more elaborate. I actually did that with Illustrator. This is the root, kind of, shape for that. And if I turn on here my Appearance and my 3D, you'll see that it's easy to just, you know, make this using... from this shape go into 3D, and then Inflate. Now, throwing them back into Photoshop, now, you know, as you know, you can do Layers or you can do Smart Objects, which you can use to edit back and forth, which is great for me, you know. I'm going to skip a little bit ahead because I don't have a lot of time, again, you know. Time keeps moving. I did some blending on this. Typically, what I do... Who names the layers here? Wow. A bunch of liars. Okay.

As you can tell, I don't have my layers named. I'm trying to move fast sometimes when I'm doing this creative work, and I don't want to be interrupted by naming, naming, naming. I do it often at the end, you know, but sometimes I just group it, and when I group it, I do a mask on that group and that's how I get around to do stuff like this, which is kind of like the shading inside of this flower on the left side. I don't know if you can see that, it's little hard to see. But just soft brush to blend that into the environment. All right. I'm going to jump on to my few final tips, which are, you know, to make any image feel complete, you need to have three things. You need to have noise or... Actually, I do have a little slide for that, if you want to take notes. Boom, there it is. Noise or Texture, Levels, Color and Atmosphere, and Focus, which is Blur, right? So you want to add these three things for an image to go from super flat to super engaging. And that's what I've done here. You can see the Noise or the Texture, you can see how I added, like a Levels or an Adjustment layer. And I added even textures that are assigned to different spots. You don't ever want to go ahead and just throw one of these on top of everything and call it a day. This is not Tic Tac. We're not going to do that. We're going to apply them by areas and we're going to be erasing them in and out. So, you know, something that I want to share about is after you have all this done, you've done a lot of work and that's great. But you need to keep finding anchor images that you can use this with. This is something that I understood later in my career. Sometimes I'll be done. I will be attached to my work. And it was horrible to feel like, "Oh, I have to go start over again." But the more I did that, the more I found images like this. And because I spent all that time making those assets, I can just throw them in. This is my own version of generative AI.

And then throwing these assets into these new things can give you results that you weren't expecting because maybe the anchor image that you found is super exciting. And my final, final tip, I have 30 seconds is to spend some time actually using these assets that you created to create a lot of different things that your clients can enjoy and see, and they can see how the assets could be used for a lot more things than what you supply. So hopefully they approve your work once you spend a little bit of time. Creating some variations, doing this portal kind of idea, doing stuff like that that people can feel good to sign off on, and that's it. My name is Magdiel. I'll see you guys around. Bye.

-Thank you. -Thank you, Magdiel.

All right. Anybody else have a new design crush? Don't make it weird. He's amazing, right? Come on, now. All right, I'm going to move through this really fast. We went through everything. We've seen the screenshots here. They all have been about how to do things, but we thought to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. So it's not going to necessarily be about pushing pixels, it's about sort of taking a bigger look. So please welcome our award-winning logo designer, seasoned freelancer, owner of Barnard Co., a force on social media. Welcome, James Barnard.

Hello. That was really high energy. Can we all just calm down a little bit, please? Thank you very much. All right. My name is James Barnard. I'm thirty eight and a half years old. I am a logo designer, a seasoned freelancer. I spend 50% of my working date on my client work, and the other half of my time teaching everything I've learned over nearly 15 years in the business of graphic design and on my social channels via Adobe Livestreams and talking to good people like you. I'm from the U.K., but I currently live in Australia with my wife and two young children. And I set off from the Gold Coast at half nine on Sunday night, flew for 13 hours and arrived in L.A. 3 hours in the past. So if at any point during this talk you start to question the validity of anything that I'm saying, just remember that I'm from the bloody future. And with that in mind, I'd like to welcome you to this lecture, Signed Off. No Amends. We did all the hard work with the design. How do we get the client to sign off in one go? Now, in a minute, I'm going to show you an actual client email that I received long enough ago that we can laugh about it now. But don't get me wrong, it still makes me shudder a little bit every time I read it. This is a real email, and I blanked out the details to hide the client name and some specifics. But before I show it, I need to lay the groundwork a little bit and explain where my head was at when I received this client feedback email. This is from a time where I just decided to niche down into logo design. I've been a freelancer for years, but a few months prior to this client project, in order to focus only on logo design work...

I'd fired two retainer clients who were paying me regular monthly income for generic graphic design services. I just moved to a region in Australia that was paying half the day rate that I was on in London and my wife had just given birth to this little cherub. So she was on maternity leave and a reduced income. So the stakes were pretty high on this job and I was freaking out a little bit. So far this project had really not been going well.

It's one of my first clients in my new venture as "logo designer extraordinaire," and I had just sent over my fifth iteration of completely original designs, four of which the client had just flat out rejected. The project was so far over deadline that we were way past the point where I was making any money on the job. And this was the concept that I just presented. The company had the word "electric" in their name, so I used two extruded E's that leave a lightning bolt and the negative space between them, including these snazzy-looking halftone dots to add some one-color shading. You can clap now. Thank you. Yeah. I was seriously proud of this. Right. I obviously changed the name of the client here, but there were loads of scalable variations that we could use using this as a concept. Now, before I sent this across, I could tell that the client was getting a bit fed up. They'd already alluded to the fact that they were uncomfortable about me continuing and they wouldn't be able to commit any additional budget to this project. So when I tell you that I was nervous opening this email, that would be the understatement of the millennia. If the client didn't like this option, it was game over. All right. Here we go. "I think the best and fairest thing to do is to close this project out." I was going to do Australian all the way through, I'm bailing, I'm bailing. "I'm happy for you to keep the deposit in order to cover the work you've done. Thanks so much for your work to date, all the very best of everything and genuinely sorry we couldn't make it work." Okay. So what the client is saying is I'm fired. And not only am I fired, my work sucks so bad that they would rather forgo a £3,000 deposit to be released from my clutches in order to work with another designer. Now, it took a couple of weeks of mourning in order to really appreciate the morale of this story. I went through all the stages of grief and when I finally got to the bottom, I had to admit that this was all my fault. From the outset, this client was kind, courteous. They valued the work in my portfolio. They paid what I asked with no haggling, and they provided what I thought was a fantastic brief with loads of creative freedom. And I reckon Firefly got this one right. Doesn't he just look like a lovely guy? He did nothing wrong. So what do you do in that situation? Well, in the words of James Clear, "When successful people fail, they rebound quickly." Now, I definitely wasn't feeling very successful at this point, but I did go back to the drawing board and started rewriting my process. Six months later, this starts happening. My clients begin to sign off my projects faster and in some cases, with one round of amend or even no amends at all. This obviously speeds up my workflow and allows me to get more clients through the door, and it frees up my time to spend on my own personal branding and my own marketing, which in turn brings in more leads. And because of this, and thanks to a little help from social media, in 2022, I had my best year ever as a freelancer. And this financial year, I'm on track to beat it by 60%. So someone who sits… Thank you. Okay, stop it. As someone who sits in the shorts and a T-shirt making logos from spare bedroom, that still blows my mind. So, what did I do differently? All right. The first thing I realized was that the discovery phase of the project was failing. I was so keen to get started on projects that I would go bold deep into the design phase, thinking that this was speeding up the delivery, working up these beautiful Photoshop mockups while utterly praying that the client like my ideas, when in reality an hour spent here in discovery and ideation would have saved me a day in the software. So I rewrote my briefing documents to answer this main question. Now, you can insert your own sports analogy here. Like what does a home run look like? Or how can we make this a slam dunk? But get the client to agree on a paragraph or a statement that you can work towards. So, for example, "To walk away with a logo that stands out from our competitors, has the room for future expansion and uses concepts revolving around retro gaming, gaming controllers but retains a color palette close to our previous brand." Or, "To rebrand with a symbol that embodies the characteristics of a hummingbird, efficient, streamlined and constantly in motion, all the while appealing to a tech-savvy customer base." This gives both you and the client a clear goal to work towards and that you can refer back to later on. Now, getting to this is not easy, and depending on the type of client you're dealing with, whether they're high maintenance or on the thrifty side, there are different ways to get there. But what's important is that these discussions and the back and forth is happening here in discovery and not during the design phase, because high-maintenance clients who feel like they absolutely must be part of the creative process can have their say here, where it's much easier to take on feedback rather than at the design phase, which is not their area of expertise, it's yours. There's also a bonus tip here specifically for logo designers, which I totally stole from Allan Peters, Try and agree on a set of brand nouns that you can work with. So for this client, I was working with Cardow & Co. We came up with four preapproved nouns that I could use during the design phase. So in the final design, I incorporated a key shape into the negative space between the wording. And by having an agreed upon set of things to use as concepts for a design and make sure that there weren't any surprises. Now, if I'd done that with this first client, there's no way they would have picked a lightning bolt. So this was a complete waste of time. All right. The second thing I changed was my client deadline. By a show of hands, who here has ever sent a design to a client knowing it wasn't your best work, just to meet their deadline? I mean, you're all mad perfectionists, isn't it? It's completely understandable, because, normally, you'll always be able to fix your shitty work during the amends phase which has been built into the project. Well, this was a big problem for me. I was putting myself under immense pressure by attempting to get jobs back to clients in a few days. And my thinking, again, was that this would lead to more clients through the door. But by working to a self-imposed deadline and rushing the job, this would just mean more feedback down the line, which only increased the length of the job. And also, the work I was putting out was subpar. Today, I ask for two weeks from the start of a job before the client receives any work from me. This gives me the time to avoid burnout, be as creative as possible, and it allows me to take breaks and to sleep on my work. If you're anything like me, you all will come back with fresh eyes to a design that you've been working on only to hate what you're looking at now. So building in a decent buffer of clients gives you the freedom to present your best work with the goal of having it signed off first go. Now this is the most important step. Client feedback should be treated in the same way. Do not rush them. If a client sends me feedback within the first few hours of my presentation, that is a massive red flag for me. They're knee-jerk reacting to your work without having a chance to sit with a design for any suitable amount of time. Change can be jarring. And in my case with logo design, it's often rebranding an already established company that the client feels like they have birthed into the world. They're going to feel protective of it, and it will feel weird the first time someone tries to change it. So I almost forced my client to sit with a design for a few days or even a week before we jump on a call to go through any changes. By then they've had a chance to let the design sink in, sleep on it a couple of times, or even share it with the people closest to them. Now we've all heard the line, "My nephew can use Photoshop and he said this..." So take this feedback with a little pinch of salt. But often the opinions of those closest to the client mean the most to them. So this could be a really, really important step in getting a quick signoff, especially if comments from friends and family are positive. But in the event that the client's nephew who can use Photoshop does have some feedback for you, you'll be ready for it because of this step, "Be prepared to defend your work." Look at this little fresh-faced bumpkin. That's me, ten years ago, when I worked in publishing. I used to work on a digital team, creating competition pages and online advertorials for mags like Grazia and FHM. And in those days, we had a real "too many cooks" problem. Our work would have to go through two different internal teams before it eventually went back to the advertiser for approval. And in each one of those teams, they had individuals who wanted their say, especially on specific design choices like the color for a call to action or the typeface we picked. I would even get specific point sizes for things like key lines under a heading. It was insane and such a drain on the resources of our team that my creative director, Zoe, at the time, implemented something. Each time we sent the design across to an internal team for approval, we would need to accompany the work with a one paragraph rationale, and the aim was to second guess the feedback that we'd eventually get in order to sort of preemptively justify our design choices. Now, honestly, at that time I saw this as a massive pain in the ass. We were already under-resourced, that now I'm having to explain why I picked a color range for a client. But over the next few months, something happened. The designers on the team had this paragraph on their mind while they were working, and it forced us to think critically about our design decisions as we were designing, knowing that we'd ultimately have to defend them. Two things happened. Firstly, our designs became less cluttered because every time we added something like a border or some effect, like a glow or a drop shadow, that probably added nothing to the overall design, we realized we couldn't defend it, so we just removed it. And secondly, the amount of feedback we received internally plummeted because we'd anticipated the internal question and had preemptively answered them with our rationale. Today, I apply this to my freelance business. My rationale is clear and concise and tries to preemptively explain away my design choices. Without answers to these questions, I open myself up to subjective criticism and doubt, which leads to indecision, more feedback and a slower signoff process. Now, obviously, this process isn't infallible, and not every client is going to sign off with no amends. And if it doesn't work and the client rejects your idea, make sure you have this line in your T's and C's. "All original preparation materials, sketches, visuals and unused ideas will remain the property of me." This one line saved me more money and time than you can imagine. So if you take one thing away from today, let this be it. Being able to reuse rejected concepts allows you to build libraries of unused material to use in other projects, which adds to your efficiency and ultimately helps you get more clients through the door. So, for example, the logo I made for my wife's consultancy business on the right is a concept that was rejected from another client, which is great, because my wife, obviously, wasn't paying me. And remember this guy? Well, I submitted this design to a book called the LogoLounge as a concept design. Rejected or not, I was very proud of it, and it got accepted. And now it's used in a best-selling… Stop. Thanks. Stop it. It's used in a best-selling design book that sits on the desks of designers and agencies all around the world. And the publishers liked it, so much they put it on the cover.

Eventually, I ended up giving this logo away to an electrician called Chloe from the South of England, who was going out on her own and starting up a company called Engage Electrical. And Chloe is a big champion of females in trade positions, and she teaches victims of domestic abuse, the skills to gain their independence, which is a perfect fit for that logo. I'm sure you'll agree. And then it won an award. So, I turned it into neon for my office to remind me of the valuable lessons that this logo taught me. To recap, these were, spend more time with the brief. An hour spent in the discovery phase will save you a day in the design phase. Get clients to have their say here rather than at the design phase, which is not their area of expertise, it's yours. Get as much time as possible from the client to allow you to take breaks from your work and come back to the design fresh the next day. And don't rush your clients' feedback, let the design sink in with them. Think about how you'll defend your work and preemptively explain your design choices to your clients. Otherwise, you open yourself up to doubts, which leads to indecision and more feedback. And finally, make sure your T's and C's cover the use of your ideas, so you can keep treasure troves of your unused work to use on future projects. Be great. Thanks very much.

-Thank you so much. -Thanks. -Want to use this? -Oh, yeah, sure. All right. We need more James in our life. That's for sure, buddy. Thank you so much. Wish we had you for an hour. Wish we had everybody for an hour. But that is our time. I know we crammed a lot in. Just wanted to say thank you so much from all of us to you. We really appreciate your time. Thank you, everybody, for watching. Don't forget to fill out the survey. And thank you for attending our first Super Session. Appreciate you guys. Have a great day.

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Creativity Super Session: Graphic Design - SS1

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ABOUT THE SESSION

Join Adobe Principal Evangelist Paul Trani and top designers Kelsey Slay, Anna McNaught, and Magdiel Lopez as they show off new technologies to help speed up and perfect your graphic design workflows using tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Express, and Adobe Firefly. Bonus! Top logo designer James Barnard takes the stage with Signed off, No Amends, sharing insights and tips and tricks for improving the client-designer dynamic, all pulled from his professional experiences.

You’ll walk out of this session with:

  • New features, pro tips, and collaboration tools using Illustrator and Express
  • Ways to use generative AI technology in Photoshop and Adobe Firefly to create content on the fly
  • Inspiring ideas to revise your design process to get to “Yes” while minimizing churn and revisions

Technical Level: General Audience

Type: Creativity Super Session

Category: Generative AI

Track: Graphic Design

Audience Types: Art/Creative Director, Business Strategist/Owner, Graphic Designer

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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