[music] [Emily Otoshi] Hi, my name is Emily Otoshi. Thank you so much for coming to my session. First, here's a little bit about me. I'm a third year cognitive science undergrad at UCLA. It's an interdisciplinary major that marries my passions in the humanities with STEM. I am the founder and president of Adobe Creatives Club at UCLA. We hold meetings, workshops, networking opportunities, and events to spread knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud products, also undertaking projects to give back, get involved, and grow together towards our greater purpose. I'm also the director of UCLA Kyodo Taiko, the nation's first collegiate Taiko drumming team, founded in 1990. We perform at events across southern California and promote the art of Japanese American Taiko. They're my second family.
I'm the co-music director of Hui O 'Imiloa, UCLA's Hawaii club. My co and I teach workshops, arrange Hawaiian music pieces, and dance hula for our org's annual luau held in the historic Pali pavilion. Finally, I'm the design director for the Taiko Taikai and a graphic designer for UCLA Residential Life. But besides all those things, many people know me as the person who is always taking photos. I even got a nickname from it, Memily. However, the reason I do so has to do with the big picture, something more about life in general. I'd like you to ask yourself, why do you create? Why do you get involved in the things you do? What drives you in life, and to keep moving forward? For me, it's fulfillment, hope, and purpose. Everything is a gift and time is precious. For all the beauty and goodness in the world, there is just as much hardship and tragedy where we are left wondering why. Yet it reminds us of all we have to be grateful for and all the potential that we have to grow, feel, love, and create.
We create emotions, relationships, and beauty. We create our past, present, and future. We create art and music and community.
We create to find and make the beauty in life, to express the entirety of ourselves, and connect with all those around us, to savor these moments where we are fully present and alive, to choose to embrace the wonder and to keep moving forward despite it all. It is finding our life's fulfillment in the big and small moments so that we have no regrets. So that our existence isn't driven by fear, it's driven by love.
So going back to the start, I create to make the most of life. I create to value the present, so that no matter what happens, I can keep moving forward. In all of the seemingly unrelated things I'm involved in, creation and design is the common thread. We need design to share our stories, expand our communities and to convey the missions we hold. Ultimately, everything is connected. Everything changes. At every moment, you have the potential to be infinite possible versions of yourself. Your life, your potential is what you create with your reality. There is so much beauty in the world. There is so much beauty in people. There is strength in doing and your power, your voice, is in what you create.
It's time to talk everything Adobe, let's go.
I'm an Adobe ambassador, campus leader, and founder and president of Adobe Creatives at UCLA. I founded Adobe Creatives in the summer of 2023 with our official launch in winter quarter January 2024. As an ambassador, I've organized or led 40-plus events and created 50-plus social posts. I love getting involved in events and exploring all the organizations, resources, and programs that campus has to offer. I'm extremely passionate about leading events and cultivating those human connections. Seeing everything come together with Adobe Creatives was such a fulfilling experience, especially the community that formed out of it. Starting at the very beginning, we were so fortunate to attend Adobe MAX 2023 where we met so many inspiring creatives and learn all about Adobe's new innovations. It was truly motivating to embrace the energetic environment, amazing interactivity, and elaborate offerings of the event. The reveals that MAX sneaks had us talking for weeks after, from Project Primrose to Stardust. Adobe MAX is what inspired me to have the Creative Cloud Conference for our clubs' end-of-year event. More about that very soon. At its launch and throughout the year, we held countless tablings to promote the club across campus, also raising awareness that UCLA students get free Adobe software. It's such a wonderful resource that everyone should take advantage of and we provide the projects, guidance, and workshops to do so. Our first major event was our launch fair in UCLA Central Bruin Plaza where hundreds of people stopped by to participate in our pop-up Express design contest, raffles, free giveaways, activity stations, photobooths, and more. It was a wonderful way to open with a bang. I designed all of the promotional material, photobooth strips, and printed sign designs for the event in Express. It was an easy and effective way to create quick animations for posting, make new graphics, and create QR codes. Featured here are the signage used for the event table, our contest info sign, instructions, and Instagram story voting for entrance.
Our first speaker featured Vita Kari, an incredible visual artist whose craziest thing about being creating videos captivated the Internet along with their Vitawood immersive art space. After meeting them at MAX, they graciously agreed to give a speech for Adobe Creatives about their creative process, journey, and work. I designed all the promotional and print material for this in Express as well. Their featured assets had all I needed to bring the design vision I had to life. Express' convenient resize function was my best friend here, instantly modifying the design to the form I needed, even for our digital billboard. The event was a success and Vita presented such an inspiring speech, connecting personally to each attendee's journey and taking the time to offer their knowledge for all that was asked. Our second speaker event was with Naheel Jawaid, an incredibly accomplished and experienced designer who's worked for Google and Kids Takeover, a successful hip-hop media channel. I also created the promo reels for this in Express and resized it to fit all my posting needs. He gave an amazing presentation about finding direction in life and masterfully shared insight about being a creative with product thinking and design strategy, following up with a networking Q&A session. I'd like to thank Vita and Naheel again for all of their kindness speaking. We truly appreciate your support. Throughout the year, we collaborated with many organizations across campus such as the learning centers, her campus, AI ethics, and more. One of my favorites was designing and making tote bags with the makerspace for a Valentine's Day-themed event. Beforehand, I also held a club tabling where I handed out roses to people on campus. I also brought in speakers virtually from Adobe for their expertise and networking. All of these events were key in expanding our creative community, each experience prompting us to think bigger and connect further. We also have weekly general meetings where we feature a different Adobe platform for attendees to learn about each session, in addition to activities, giveaways, and socials. I made almost all of the posts on our Instagram to promote our club events using, of course, Adobe Express. These are some of my favorite GM posts I created, cloud-themed for our spring quarter. Here are some of the other event promo posts that I liked in addition to our board announcement for last year. Finally, here's one of my favorite tutorial posts I made showcasing Express features in a fun video game theme.
While our first quarter was mostly structured around these all-level accommodating workshops, we also added group project work during spring quarter. Everyone had the opportunity to be placed into a cloud, specialty groups where people could deepen their knowledge with like-minded creatives and work towards a cumulative project. In this case, it was our end of year cloud conference. It was my dream to have our own unique mini Adobe MAX, essentially a thesis event for our entire club and its community. Our wonderful clouds each worked on a different aspect of the conference and had their work displayed there. Here are some amazing graphics that the visual design group came up with, created in Illustrator and Express. They also came up with the beautiful event logos, branding, and stickers.
In addition to promoting months in advance, we held a tabling for a few hours before the event to filter people to it. We held it in the Kirchhoff Gallery, a perfect place for a creative event. Upon checking in, there is plenty of free merchandise and giveaways available. We also had many incredible sponsors due to the hard work of our outreach director. I also made a stamp card to incentivize attendees to explore. If they got two, they were allowed to get free food and three would enter them into a huge raffle. Their free food included different types of pizza, garlic knots, energy drinks, and two types of milk tea with themed toppings, mango jelly stars, and crystal boba to symbolize the clouds. Here are more beautiful sticker designs that our visual design cloud came up with. We printed and distributed them at the event. It was the perfect way to personalize and add that final touch. Our film editing and photography cloud had their work displayed in the gallery, showcasing the best cloud-centric pictures they took around UCLA. They were edited in Lightroom and printed professionally for everyone to enjoy. Our UX/UI team created this gorgeous website for our conference, effectively laying out all the important details with amazing graphics. Visit cloudconference.webflow.io to view it. With the goal of expanding the creative community, local clubs and small businesses also tabled at the event.
Innovative design sold their own custom merch and was stationed to speak about their org. Gloria Kum, one of our speakers, brought her amazing small business illustrations, prints, and stickers. She even made a special edition design for our event, sold only for the day. Follow glo.shrimp to learn more about her work. Our attendees had a great time exploring the conference before our guest speakers, Timothy Lee and Gloria Kum, presented. They told motivating stories about their creative journey and how they use Adobe in their work and passions. We enjoyed a wonderful networking session with them afterward as well. Finally, we wrapped up with a year in review and our raffle of gift cards, Adobe Merch and art prints. It was truly a perfect way to wrap up the year and to celebrate our community. Much thanks to everyone in Adobe Creative, our executive board, collaborators, and Timothy and Gloria for all you do. So excited for next year. Let's look at some other Express case uses for community building and the college experience. Here's some of my favorite pieces I made for Kyodo Taiko. Every year, there's countless club tablings during fall quarter, the biggest one being the Enormous Activities Fair or EAF.
For all of these tablings, solid advertisement designs and handouts are critical, perfect for Express usage. I made a flyer promo graphic for Kyodo, advertising all the important details of our org and our first intro workshop. We'll go into a deep dive on this one in just a bit.
Kyodo has the great privilege of performing for the Manzanar pilgrimage ceremony every year where we honor, reflect, and remember those incarcerated in the Japanese-American internment camps. I use Express to document this year's experience, from folding 1000 cranes to offer to the monument together to the Taiko performance. It means a lot to be able to share these events and to recount all the emotion, vibrancy, and impact that this experience holds for our layers of communities. This design was the cover of our 2023 Spring Concert program, themed ICHI-GO ICHI-E, a phrase that reminds us that every moment is gold, a unique experience to be treasured and appreciated. I ideated and designed the graphic in Adobe Fresco before bringing it into Express to mock up program cover drafts which the publicity team then edited and finalized. I also used Express's library feature to easily establish branding ideas for the program, making it easy to experiment between ideas while keeping everything organized and consistent. I also created some sticker designs in Illustrator as shown on the side, later bringing them into Express for minor edits and printing prep.
Next up is Hui O 'Imiloa. Mia and I have designed the program for Hui's annual luau for the past two years. Last year, I made the center graphic in Fresco before exporting out to Express for program ideation. This year we brainstormed a vision board on Illustrator and designed the main graphic on Fresco as shown on the right. A major benefit to Express is its easy interconnectivity between other Adobe software and it was simple to share files and pull everything onto Express for organization. I love how this year's design turned out and the energy it emanates. We also use this one for our club t-shirts. I also use Express to make my story post promos for our ukulele workshops and to create easy-to-read sheet music for our practices and performances. It was such a useful tool in allowing me to easily edit everything to my vision and for any changes that came up. I designed slides and assets on Illustrator before importing to Express to finalize and present for our workshops as well. Finally, let's take a look at the Taiko Taikai.
The branding and promo for the event featured last year's champion Odaiko competitor Sarah Gilbert. We’ll take a deeper dive into this design in just a minute. Here are some of the promotional Instagram stories I made. Express made compiling all the logos, assets, and photos I needed very easy and accessible so I could post daily. I loved using the animation features for these as well. I also made Express info posts importing assets I made in Illustrator into Express to create these graphics and editing photos with Express's adjustment features. Finally, Express made it seamless to incorporate video posts as well, like these created for this year's incredible general division winners. After seeing all those examples, it's time to hop into Express. Let's create. But first, let's hear a little bit about Firefly and generative AI. Adobe Firefly is trained on their own licensed and high-quality Adobe Stock content. They've integrated the power of generative AI into their software, helping to streamline our design workflow and make Adobe's world of tools more accessible to everyone, including students. Art is a product of humanity. Each artist's creativity, effort, and talent is what makes the meaning of each work so beautiful. From where we are now, AI should be used as an innovative tool to help artists create in this landscape, such as being able to easily make tedious effects, play around with color and visuals, create voiceovers and small assets, et cetera to enhance their own created work, allowing for fast experimentation and more time for actual creation. My favorite Express features that use Firefly include generative fill and text effects.
This entire video was made in Adobe Express, the editing, animation, compilation, audio, and all. It's amazing to have all these powerful and easy-to-use tools in one place, made for your promotional and creative needs. For now, I'll show you how I made some of my favorite Express social media posts and design, along with my process and highlighting some awesome features. Let's start with how I began to make the Adobe Board post. Typically I always like to start from scratch without a template, but sometimes a little inspiration is needed. In this case, I'll highlight the Text to Template feature. You can type in whatever theme you're looking for and get a relevant template generated just like that, or even upload your own photos as a starting point. They also offer easy resizing with many different options. If none of those are to your liking, you can also search the thousands of templates Express has provided with help for filters and bases. This is the template that I chose to experiment with all that time ago. I personally really like the idea of having clouds in the background, but wouldn't choose that particular photo. All I would have to do is navigate to media, then go under photos or videos and search for whatever I'd like and instantly get millions of results at the palm of my hand. I also like the idea of having circular photos and visuals at the center but would probably change the text. What I ended up doing in the actual post was changing the font to the Adobe font, bolding it, and then spreading the letters apart to make a nice headliner. I also went to the Elements section and found some stars to decorate the rest of our photos here for Board. Another effect that I wanted to bring up was our text effects. There's bows, arch, circles, and my favorite dynamic text. I chose to use the arch effect for this one and I think it worked beautifully.
Next, let's take a look at the Taikai post and how it's made.
This is definitely one of my favorite designs. I knew that when I was first making it that Sarah Gilbert would be the center focus of the designs and so I chose a very dynamic photo of her playing Ozaiko and I used the remove background feature, which is super convenient to use. One click and then the background's gone. You can also undo it just like that. You can also have the erase feature here in case you need to touch up with any small things. They also have a restore feature and it's super easy. You can quick selection with your brush, change the size, reset, invert, and everything. They also have the wonderful generative fill so you can select what you like to be highlighted and then describe what you want to be replaced in that image and then it will be fixed right away for you. As far as the other features that I used in this design, I took one of the dragon elements from the elements section.
I was going through Design Assets and I really liked this specific one and I decided it to be a constant throughout all of the Taikai branding. And then as far as the little fish icons, that was something that I made in Illustrator as one of my assets.
I chose these fonts specifically just through going all of them and trying to see which one fit that strong, bold kind of feeling that I wanted to have for this, and then a nice smooth Sans Serif for the secondary font down here. Over here is all of our critical information, as well as a blank space for our logos and sponsors. And then I animated the text and I animated the background fish and the dragon to be moving for when we have the Instagram post up. In this case, I just used Breathe for our looping animations, but they have all kinds of amazing ones. And also you can customize what speed, personality, and intensity you like all of those to be. So these are just really amazing resources to use whenever you're making your social media posts. I also use the resize a lot for this particular project, so you can immediately resize whatever design you have to Instagram square posts, stories, videos as much as you like and it will duplicate and resize them right away.
Finally, let's look at a promo flyer from Kyodo Taiko and see the features that it uses.
Starting on an 8.5x11 sheet document, and that's just so that we can easily print it out onto flyers or configure it into 4x4's for handouts and making things for flyering. Let's try recreate as much as we can on the next sheet. So we're gonna start with adding some text here. I can type in Kyodo Taiko and then they have so many recommended fonts that you can use. I really like this feature because it gives you so many ideas at once and you can always refresh or show more if you'd like. You can also look through all of these or you can upload your own fonts or find more fonts here. I really just like to go through all of these. I could do this forever, but the ones that I really like to use for this one is the Peckham Press.
We can move that up there and resize it just a little bit.
Now we're going to duplicate this. So it's going to be two times for now. So we can hit the Option key and then drag down and that will duplicate it for you right away. And now we're going to change this to an outline. And then once we have that, we can duplicate that as well. Bring that down.
In our original, we have it a little bit offset, I believe, and then we have it with no background so we can easily change the fill in outline here, as well as our stroke and thickness.
Alright, awesome. Now we have something super similar to what we have above.
We can go ahead and select all of that, group it, and then hit Option again and drag it all the way back up here if that's what you'd like.
Now we can take our pictures.
For this, usually you would just go to Upload and then you can upload whatever pictures you want from here. However, for now we're just going to copy and paste. We can make some slight adjustments if you want to increase or decrease saturation, sharpening, blurring, contrast, all that good stuff. And we don't even have to outsource to another app.
Next we can add the text so we have our Kyodo Taiko text here.
With that, we can just resize the line spacing to make it closer. And then I think I like it to have a white outline just to make it stand out against the background since it's so colorful.
Let's take a look at one last Express feature before moving on. Adobe also offers a wonderful free QR code generator service. All you have to do is paste in your URL, hit Enter, and then it's ready to download right away. I really like this specifically because you can customize your style with your dots, border, center and color, as well as your file format for exporting, and then from there, it's super easy to just drag and drop into whatever design you have.
It has been such an honor to speak for Adobe MAX. My personal goal for this session, beyond a workshop, is to provoke thought about your purpose, to inspire the initiative to take action, and to embrace the everyday beauty we find in our lives. So as I close, what would I hope to tell the world to prove to myself with this session, I hope that you seize life unafraid to fully embrace your highest highs and lowest lows, to entirely experience all of life's emotions, and what it means to be human, to grow from the pain and treasure the wonder. Because everything, everyone, every choice, good and bad in your history, has led you to where you are now and it will all be okay. I hope that you are consumed by all the raw vibrancy, joy, and beauty that is in your everyday life. That you find love in all your actions to keep moving forward no matter what, and for it to emanate in all you do with your community, passion, purpose, and life. I hope you create.
Thank you very much to Adobe and the Community Team for all of the opportunities, support, and kindness throughout the years. You've truly changed my life. Mahalo to Makana for allowing me to use Koi for this video. Thank you for all of your kindness. Please go support his incredible music at makanamusic.com. Thank you to Kyodo and HOI for all of the love and memories, to UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Residential Life and the Taiko Taikai. Much thanks to our original Adobe Creatives Board, Rum, Angela, Kush, Jeanelle, Yua, and Isabella. Much thanks to everyone who supported Adobe Creatives and in the club, and to all of my family and friends for always supporting me and my mom who taught me how to love art. Thank you so much for watching.
