Adobe Make It is a by-invitation workshop series that brings together talented creators and challenges them to explore, experiment, and create with new (and occasionally not-yet-released) Adobe tools. Earlier this month, Adobe hosted 20 artists, from around the world, and across disciplines (including illustration, design, photography, architecture, and video), for a two-day, in-person creative jam session in San Francisco’s SoMa district on September 21-22, 2023. They were tasked to leverage Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Substance 3D Stager, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Firefly or Adobe Fresco to create a rad piece of art by the end of the event. Below are the talented creatives who attended.

Ovetta Sampson, Director of UX Machine Learning at Google, urged everyone to dream with these technologies, but to also be cautious of their capabilities (the ability for machines to understand human language) and limitations (that machines create without soul or morality) so their creations would be innovative, but also responsible. She ended with a reminder that although generative AI can seem creative, creativity is a uniquely human quality nourished by human abilities to take risks, break rules, daydream, and put lived experiences into our work.

Arist Sofia Crespo, whose art questions the potential of AI to reshape our understanding of creativity, shared a portfolio of work that reimagines the natural world. She views generative AI as an extremely powerful creative tool for visual artists who can use it to extract and generate patterns from data and to create new work from combinations they may never have considered. And, as those outputs feed back into AI models, they’ll create increasingly unique data sets.

After nine hours of creation time across the two days, teams shared their work and their process. Any hurdles they had to jump or limitations they’d bumped into merged to create unique artistic interpretations. There was talk of what they’d tried to do but couldn’t, what they were able to do that amazed them, which tools were the most expedient to use and why, and where they hoped generative AI technology would go in the future. Concurrently, in another part of the space, the zine team started their printing, cropping, and stapling.

Every Make It workshop is distinct and different, but we always leave them inspired by the coupling of human imagination, ingenuity, and creativity and the capabilities of Adobe’s newest tools. Click on the pieces below to see them up close.