Adobe Firefly Community Event: Example of Why Designers Must Connect More Often

Design is a creative and constantly evolving field that covers several different industries. Day by day, design is becoming more popular, which means our community is growing exponentially. This should also mean our opportunities to network should be growing as well.

However, I believe it hasn’t been growing as much as it should.

Community events are one of the main strategies that companies use to not only advertise their products, but to get their target audience in one single room. Not only are these types of events beneficial for the businesses holding them, but they are beneficial for the consumers looking to build relationships with others. Adobe’s recent community event is a great example of a design community event.

On Thursday, April 20th, 2023, I attended the Adobe Firefly Community Event in New York City to celebrate and learn about the anticipated release of Adobe’s new generative AI, Adobe Firefly. This is one of the first community events that Adobe has had.

As a soon-to-be college graduate and aspiring graphic designer, I was blown away at the amount of information I have gathered by attending this event, and by the amount of other creative minds I was able to meet and connect with. 

Here are some of the Adobe Team Members that I met at the event:

• Terry White, Principal Director Creative Cloud Evangelist for Adobe, Inc.

• Kelly Hurlburt, Sr. Staff Experience Designer, Machine Intelligence & New Technologies

• Veronica Peitong Chen, AI/ML Experience Designer

• Matthew Richmond, Senior Director of Experience Design at Adobe

During this event, the team guided us through a series of presentations that showed the newly developed features of Adobe Firefly. After the presentations, the audience was able to participate in a Q&A session in order to better understand the platform and their process in creating this available beta version. 

During this Q&A session, questions relating to inclusivity and accessibility were asked and answered. Someone in the audience brought up the point of AI recognizing multiple different cultures and languages, which created a long discussion that both parties– the design team and the audience– will think about after the event. This showed me that without events like these where we are able to connect with other designers, we will miss out on so many other ideas that could be beneficial to our projects. 

Afterwards, the four Adobe team members stayed at the front of the room while other audience members, including myself, came up to them and introduced themselves and asked questions of their own. Matthew and I discussed the possibility of using Adobe Firefly and some of its features for mockup purposes, and I gained a lot of insight by speaking to him personally. The event then wrapped up with dinner and mingling amongst the guests. During this time, I was able to meet several other designers from Adobe and other companies and gain insight from them.

Since COVID-19, Adobe, along with other design platforms were unable to hold community events like these. However, I hope that with our new normal, more events like these will be possible, as it has been proven that this event was incredibly beneficial for everyone. As said by the Adobe Team, “This event just shows that we need to have community events like this more often.”