Adobe's all-star Creative Collective will highlight new opportunities for artists and designers

Adobe's been at the forefront of advances in creative technology for years, but even it recognises that generative AI is making the current pace of change difficult to keep up with. To get a handle on how creative work is changing on the ground, it's assembled a diverse all-star team to chart where things are going.

The Creative Collective comprises eight experts bringing very different experiences of creative work. They'll have regular meetings, compare perspectives and ideas and, hopefully, identify new opportunities for artists and designers along the way.

The Creative Collective is a cross-discipline initiative convening influential creatives from design, photography, film and social media content creation. The veteran graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister is joined by the fashion and beauty photographer Lindsay Adler, Swiss Miss design blog and studio founder Tina Roth-Eisenberg and the visual artist Tim Tadder.

They'll be sitting down for conversations with young AI natives like YouTubers Karen X Cheng and Brandon Baum, and the former DreamWorks Animation trainer turned creative technologist Don Allen Stevenson III, now Creative and AI Research Lead at Moonvalley. Rounding out the collective with a broad focus on creative careers and business is Behance founder Scott Belsky.

Adobe has a long history of working with creatives to explore trends as well as to demo its products in live streams or events like Adobe MAX. The Creative Collective has a higher level brief. Although there are likely to be conversations about tools and workflows, the broader focus is about how the nature of creative work is evolving and how creatives can build sustainable careers amid the rapid changes sparked by AI and other new technologies.

Adobe's Vice President, Product Marketing, Creative Cloud, Deepa Subramaniam sees the collective as “not just an advisory board for our products, but an advisory board and conversation think tank for the global creative community around this moment in time in the creative industry”.

“I'm excited about the broader, higher level conversation,” she says. “I believe this is a moment where as a creative you can monetise your creativity in different ways. There are more options open to you to put dollars back in your pocket, whether it's using AI to be more efficient, to drive more client work or packaging custom models to allow people to ideate with your look and feel.”

What will the Adobe Creative Collective actually do?

Adobe's still shaping its plans for the Creative Collective, but the ideas is that there will be regular live-streamed meetings as well as physical events and a newsletter. After a hiatus of several years, the Adobe 99U Conference will return in New York on 4 June, with registration to open this month.

Biannual Creative Collective Summits will offer digests of the most important themes, questions and emerging opportunities discussed in the collective's meetings, and Adobe intends to share practical community resources including playbooks and reports.

We can almost guarantee that there will be conversations about AI, although Adobe says this isn't the specific objective. Lindsay says she's joining the collective because she wants want to be part of conversations that guide how technological changes affect her industry, craft and clients.

“The years ahead will be transformative, and I want to meet them with clarity, pragmatism, and a genuine curiosity for what comes next,” she says.

“No one person knows exactly where we are headed, but bringing expert creatives together allows us to discuss a myriad of important issues including ethics, authorship, compensation, environmental impact, efficiency, evolution, and the meaning (and value) of human creativity.”

Tim, whose own career has evolved from shooting on film to digital workflows and now AI-driven processes, says he wants to help artists adapt to change during a difficult time. “My hope is that together we chart a future where technology amplifies our humanity rather than replaces it,” he says.

Stefan expresses his stance succinctly: “Brand new technologies always offer a slew of opportunities and a plethora of pitfalls. We have to create more of the former and mitigate much of the latter.”