This month, our creative team headed to the first ever Adobe Create Now event in Manchester, at New Century Hall. Our creative sponges heard from a range of designers talking about new AI features in cult-favourite Creative Cloud design apps and how they use them in their own work. ​​

We went, so you didn’t have to. Here are the best bits.

The event was opened by Kladi Vergine (@iamkladi on Instagram), an inspirational speaker who started out as a street artist, Now an award-winning designer, communication strategist, author and Senior Creative Cloud evangelist at Adobe, Kladi took us on a tour of the Adobe Firefly GenAI features available in the most-loved Creative Cloud Apps. Here are a few of our key learnings, which we are looking forward to implementing here at Refinery HQ:

Adobe Firefly Updates

Adobe Firefly is a standalone web application offering new ways to create while significantly improving creative workflows using Generative AI. Now, Adobe Firefly features can work within Photoshop (BETA). The Remove Background and Generative Fill and Generate Background tools which match the light, tone and perspective of the subject you have removed the background from will come in handy for quickly mocking up content to visualise our initial ideas for clients.

Also within Photoshop, Adobe Firefly has created a new workflow (Generate Image), which means you can create complex, custom images from scratch using text prompts. It also gives you access to Firefly capabilities (such as Firefly Effects), without leaving Photoshop. Great news for us designers as it means we can create unique images and apply additional effects all in one place.

Kladi’s full presentation deck can be found here.

We also heard from, and got lots of inspiration from other speakers including Manchester-based brand designer Jack Watson (@jackwatsondesigns on Instagram) and Dani Molyneux (@dotto_studio on Instagram) who set up creative workshop and design studio, Dotto studios in 2017. Both shared some great tips and tricks for creating engaging content to grow brands, using features within Adobe.

As well as attending the Manchester event, one of our Senior Designers, Zoe Robinson, also found the time to attend Adobe’s Leeds event. Zoe heard from Mat Voyce (@matvoyce on Instagram). Specialising in 2D type animation, Mat is mainly known for his pioneering style exploring illustrative kinetic typography. His work fuses letterforms with character and has been applied to animated GIFs, stickers, music videos and motion identities.

Check out all of Mat’s work here.

Overall, both events were inspiring and connected us to their respective local design communities. Talks like these help us stay on top of the latest innovations and capabilities within Adobe so we can use it in our client work for greater results.

We highly recommend these events to any creatives - even if it’s just for the sneak peek into upcoming software updates. We can’t wait for the next one!