10 can’t-miss sessions at Adobe MAX 2019

With only a few weeks to go until Adobe MAX, Adobe’s flagship creative event of the year, now is a great time to start building your conference agenda. Whether you’re a creative director or a brand designer, this year’s show has something for everyone — and we want to help you make the most of it! We combed the lineup for every can’t-miss workshop and inspirational talk so that the only thing to figure out when you arrive in Los Angeles is where to get the best tacos (hint: Sonoratown and Tacos1986). Take a peek at our top 10 session picks below.

Monday, November 4th: Collaboration ch-ch-changes

🌮 Building Culture, Collaboration, and Trust Through Design (1:00-2:15 p.m.)

Design systems can create better experiences for customers and employees alike. But to achieve this goal, you first need to build a culture of trust, openness, and collaboration within your design team—and across your entire business. This is exactly what Airbnb has done. In this session, join Hayley Hughes, design system lead at Airbnb, to hear how inclusivity is core to Airbnb’s design process, whether that means collaborating with product, engineering, legal, and policy teams or designing with and for people with disabilities. 

🌮 How to Nail and Scale Your Creative Process (3:35-4:30 p.m.)

Modern creative and marketing teams have never been under more pressure to produce inspiring and global multichannel work. They’re expected to push the envelope on creative campaigns, yet they’re spending more time trapped in meetings, coordinating who is doing what and decoding ambiguous creative requests than developing visionary ideas. Asana reduces the work about work so you can concentrate on building a scalable culture of creativity and collaboration. Join Dave King, CMO at Asana, to learn how creative leaders at Fortune 100 brands are bringing marketing and creative teams together to produce award-winning and market-defining work.

🌮 How Bobby Berk Gets Work Done with Style (3:35-4:30 p.m.)

After years in the creative and design field, Bobby Berk took the leap to start his own brand. Now, when he isn’t helping transform spaces on the Emmy Award–winning Netflix show Queer Eye, he’s running his own full-service bespoke interior design practice and curating content for his lifestyle site bobbyberk.com. Join us for a conversation with Bobby, and learn more about his creative process. Hear about what inspires him and how he uses Adobe tools (including Adobe Scan and Acrobat) to keep his clients happy and his business booming.

🌮 Driving Innovation and Change: Elevating the Role of Immersive Design at Amazon (5:15-6:30 p.m.)

3D design is an essential skill for modern product design teams. Immersive 3D technologies enable creative teams to operationalize design efficiencies, deliver immersive brand visualization, and accelerate a product’s time to market. Amazon is committed to innovation in design in parallel with their obligation to make sustainable design and living commonplace.

🌮 Pivoting and Taking Advantage of Change in the Workplace (5:15-6:30 p.m.)

Emerging technologies like AI and automation are transforming the nature of creative teams and careers faster than ever before. But we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of how technology is affecting the future workplace. Teams that embrace and drive change are those that will be best positioned for success.

Tuesday, November 5th: Who said work can’t also be play? 

🌮 Unraveling the Mysteries of Typography and Powering Up Your Type Skills (1:15-2:30 p.m.)

Power up your type skills to make your projects reach their full potential. In this session, typography expert Ina Saltz will share techniques and secrets that will help you see typography in a whole new light. Type doesn’t need to be mysterious and complicated: Ina will deconstruct and simplify the complexities of typographic choices and show how you can amplify your message and engage viewers in both print and screen-based media.

🌮 Making Comics: Collaborative Teamwork (1:15-2:30 p.m.)

Comic books are a classic American art form, and publishing them month after month demands that the creative process be divided into several specialty assignments. Emmy-nominated penciler and inker Ken Lashley and award-winning colorist Laura Martin will discuss how writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, and letterers collaborate to produce fully developed, captivating visual stories — and why being dynamic on a deadline is a must.

Wednesday, November 6th: Design secrets from the pros

🌮 Adobe XD: Team Collaboration Workflows (8:00-9:30 a.m.)

We live in an increasingly collaborative world, so it only makes sense that our tools evolve to help us work together more seamlessly. Join Howard Pinsky, Adobe XD evangelist, in this hands-on lab that’s all about collaboration. You’ll work directly with other attendees to solve common design problems using many Adobe XD tools. Discover how to build out design systems using linked assets and how to tackle different parts of your projects as a collective team. Get the hands-on experience that you and your team can use in everyday work.

🌮 Using Color in Your Creative Work to Increase Effectiveness and Impact (10:15-11:30 a.m.)

Color can tap into the global mood, change consumer behavior, foster deeper customer connections, and ultimately drive the response to creative work. No one knows this better than Pantone. In this session, join Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, and Richard Vevers, founder and CEO of The Ocean Agency, and hear how Pantone recently partnered with The Ocean Agency and Adobe to use color to inspire global support for action to save coral reefs — engaging brands, consumers, and the creative community.

🌮 I Have No Idea Where the Heck Ideas Come From (2:30-3:45 p.m.)

Join Xerxes Irani, principal creative director at Amazon Music, for a discussion on creative ideation. As creatives, we all have ideas, sometimes good ones! But let’s be honest — we have no idea where they come from. Some of us have figured out our own ways to conjure them up at will, but most of us struggle to recognize where and when they appear. This can be even more challenging when leading a team: What is the ideal environment for those little gems to come out of the woodwork — a brief, a timeline, a budget, a blue sky brainstorm?

And of course, no Adobe MAX would be complete without a spin around the Community Pavilion. You can meet us at booth #1029 for some extra cool swag and a live demo of Asana’s most popular features for marketing and creative teams.  Visit https://asa.na/max19 today for more details or to book a meeting with one of our product experts ahead of the show. See you there!