Review of CreativePro Week 2024
The recent CreativePro Week conference took place between 8th and 12th July in Washington DC and represented a unique opportunity for creative professionals and developers to get together and share the very latest trends, best practices and technologies in the creative software sector.
This year’s multi-track agenda featured a broad range of keynotes, workshops and tutorials covering Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Microsoft PowerPoint. Two of our DAM associates, Max Dunn from Silicon Publishing and Luis Mendes from Santa Cruz Software were in attendance, and have kindly provided their feedback and insights from this unique, practitioner-driven event.
Luis hosted a sponsored breakfast session on Thursday 11th showcasing the capabilities of Santa Cruz Software’s BannersUI – an automated banner ad design platform that allows users to intelligently reposition and resize objects for optimised export to a variety of dimensions and output formats.
DAM News owner Activo Consulting was also represented by its Data Publishing Manager Michel Ribera.
Luis Mendes
“CreativePro Week ’24 was a vibrant gathering of creatives from various experience levels, spanning from industry newcomers to veterans with over 30 years of expertise. Attendees hailed from diverse sectors, including small businesses and government agencies. The event featured sponsors addressing a wide array of client needs, ranging from individual consultancy services focused on enhancing PowerPoint design techniques to advanced tips for InDesign users. Major industry players like Adobe and Microsoft also showcased their latest advancements in AI technology.
Santa Cruz Software made a significant announcement with their new BannersUI digital ad automation tool. This tool, powered by a customer-centric AI, aims to deliver higher quality derivative ad size layouts through an assisted-design AI feature. Clients can opt-in to leverage their own design data, enabling the production of branded designs in multiple sizes with just a click. This AI technology is designed to enhance scalability by producing more accurate outputs that require fewer design adjustments, continuously improving over time..
The conference featured numerous sessions focused on artificial intelligence. Some were exclusively dedicated to AI, while others explored its integration into various tools for document analysis, generative images, and text creation. The majority of the audience, being creatives, expressed both caution and appreciation for AI technology. Many attendees viewed the rapid growth and scalability of AI as potentially destabilizing to their profession. Santa Cruz emphasized the transparency of their Assisted Layout AI as a closed system that does not use internet-sourced data, contrasting with other demonstrations that showcased extensive capabilities for generating images or text.
One notable absence at the event was the Digital Asset Management (DAM) industry. For many creatives in attendance, DAM technology seemed unfamiliar, either due to limitations in their working environments or a lack of awareness. Given the significant benefits offered by DAM systems, conferences like CreativePro Week could play a crucial role in raising awareness and providing valuable introductions to these technologies, benefiting both the creatives and the industry as a whole.”
You can connect with Luis via his LinkedIn profile.
Max Dunn
“I attended the Creative Developer Summit 2024 Wednesday and Thursday of last week, which was part of CreativePro Week.
I have attended these for many years, and it is a convergence of third-party Adobe developers from around the world. Kris Coppieters came from New Zealand, Gabe Harbs from Israel, Dean Perry from Australia, Jim Birkenseer and I from California, etc. – two InDesign team members came from India.
These traditional gatherings have gone on since Adobe stopped having their own developer gatherings around 2010. David Blatner graciously let us use his conferences for a very important side-conference around the annual CreativePro conference. Adobe has consistently sent engineers, and while it’s usually friendly, there have been times when it was quite combative. For example, 2015: https://www.siliconpublishing.com/blog/2015-06-adobe-indesign-after-a-decade-of-dominance-what-next/ (David’s conference at the time was PePCon).
The past 8 years, the trend has been positive with the relationship between Adobe and us third parties. This conference continued that trend. Here is the schedule for the 2 days:
https://creativeproweek.com/dc-2024/creative-developers-summit/
Pradeep Verma, engineering lead from InDesign, had friendly dialogue with us and there was no conflict. The summit had more energy than recent summits thanks to the new Adobe technologies: Firefly, Express, UXP, and Photoshop APIs. James Lockman (a fantastic solutions engineer from Adobe) spent a whole day with us on UXP and Firefly services on Wednesday. Then we had several sessions on Thursday. I presented on Express and InDesign, and I hope conveyed to the others our total enthusiasm for Express and especially its extensibility. My blog post corresponding to the presentation is here:
All in all it was an exciting time: the time spent face-to-face with creatives and developers was invaluable. I have been meeting with many of these same people for over 15 years, and it’s well worth the trip every time. Adobe has recently surged in developer support, and does now have conferences, but they are virtual. In-person conferences like this are inevitably far more powerful.”
You can connect with Max via his LinkedIn profile.
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