Key Courses for AEC Marketers: The Adobe MAX Creativity Conference

This article originally appeared on SMPS Boston’s website.

by Kristie Norris

The Adobe MAX Creativity Conference is revered by digital content creators all over the globe. With short, half-hour tutorials conducted by industry experts covering every Adobe product available in the Creative Cloud, the conference is a go-to event of any year. Due to health concerns, Adobe MAX 2020 was presented completely digitally, and for the first time, completely free. Hundreds of courses were broadcast live from Oct. 20-22 covering in-depth tips and tricks and how to use new features for the 2020 update for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere,  and others. As a bonus, they also sent attendees a choice of three custom designed masks.

If you happened to miss a course due to scheduling/deadline conflicts or even the entire Adobe MAX Creativity Conference, fear not! Adobe has made all the courses available to stream online along with example files to accompany the lessons.

I highly recommend the following courses for any AEC marketer to streamline your creative processes:

InDesign Type and Layout Series by Nigel French

Part 1: Structure and Hierarchies

Part 2: Fixes, Adjustments, and Design

Part 3: Fonts, OpenType and Polishing Docs

Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign Series by Bart Van De Wiele

Part 1: Content Management

Part 2: Imports and Snippets

Part 3: Design Techniques

Editing Faster and Smarter in Premiere Pro by Luisa Winters

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Quick Tips for Creating the Most Engaging Social Media Videos by Amber Torrealba

One recent feature I want to highlight is Send for Comments in both InDesign and Acrobat. This allows you to share drafts of your work with colleagues by providing a link to a pdf view of your document on Adobe Cloud for your colleagues to access. There are five reasons why I find this feature incredibly useful:

1. Reviewers don’t need to have an Adobe account to view and provide comments to your document
2. Anyone with an email address can make comments, so you can collaborate with people outside your company on documents
3. Multiple editors can access the document to provide comments simultaneously
4. Comments will show up in real time in InDesign or Acrobat as they are created
5. You can create a deadline for comments

I’ve already made use of this feature at my company by incorporating it into my proposal draft and design document review process. I encourage you to give it a try!

Kristie Norris is a proposal manager and a member of the Communications and Professional Development committees.