Like so many folks inside Adobe & far beyond, I’m saddened by the passing of our co-founder & a truly great innovator. I’m traveling this week in Ireland & thus haven’t time to compose a proper remembrance, but I’ve shared a few meaningful bits in this thread (click or tap through to see):

I am so sorry to hear of the passing of Adobe cofounder John Warnock. He changed all our lives, and those of millions more, for the better. God bless and godspeed, sir. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/ZHZDdkqcOO

— John Nack (@jnack) August 20, 2023

I’ve yet to see Wes Anderson’s latest, but I enjoyed this brief peek into how it was made:

Bonus: Bird!

This is me, giving my now-48yo brain a birthday break by skipping any attempt at meaningfulness & instead sharing just some pure exuberant mayhem. 🤘😛🤘

I know very little about this plugin—only what’s shown below—but it looks promising:

OT, but too charming not to share. 😌 It’s amazing the creative mileage one can get from just a few minutes (if that) worth of recut footage plus a relatable concept.

Yikes—my ability to post got knocked out nearly a week ago due to a WordPress update gone awry. Hopefully things are now back to normal & I can resume sharing bits of the non-stop 5-alarm torrent of rad AI-related developments that land every day. Stay tuned!

I cannot tell you just how much I need this in my life. 🥰 Click through to see the whole gallery.

Saturday Night Live’s pre-taped segments would be impressive on any timetable—but to produce them in a matter of days (sometimes editing right up until airtime, and even beyond for digital distribution) is truly bonkers. Check out how ambitious they’ve gotten, thanks to their incredible production team & tools:

Check out this long-desired hotness!

Photographer Dan Marcolina has been pushing the limits of digital creation for many years, and on Feb. 9 at 11am Eastern time, he’s scheduled to present a lecture. You can register here & check out details below:

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Dan will demonstrate how to use an AI workflow to create dynamic, personalized imagery using your own photos. Additional information on Augmented Reality and thoughts from Dan’s 35-year design career will also be presented.

What attendees will learn:

• Tips from Dan’s book iPhone Obsessed, revealing how to best shoot and process photos on your cell for use in the AI re-imagination process  SEE THE BOOK
• The AI photo re-creation workflow with tips and tricks to get started quickly, showing how a single source image can be crafted to create new meaning.
• The post process of upscaling, clean-up, post manipulation and color correction to obtain a gallery ready image.
• As a bonus he will show a little of how he did the augmented reality aspect of the show.

Anyone interested in image creation, photography, illustration, painting, storytelling, design or who is curious about AI/AR and the future of photography will gain valuable insights from the presentation.

These short re-imaginings are an absolute delight. Cue the John Williams…

…and Johann Strauss:

Brilliant. Enjoy your next three minutes! 🏎️🐢🐢🐢

Man, it is so weird to watch this scene with a laugh track & those whimsical mouth sounds:

It’s wild to look back & realize that I’ve spent roughly a third of my life at this special place, making amazing friends & even meeting my future wife (and future coworker!) on a customer visit. I feel like I should have more profundity to offer, and maybe I will soon, but at the moment I just feel grateful—including for the banger of a party the company threw last week in SF.

Here’s a fun little homage to history, made now via Photoshop 1.0. (I still kinda wish I hadn’t been talked into donating my boxed copy of 1.0 to the Smithsonian! The ‘Dobe giveth…)

Raise your hand if you’re a Day 1.0 @Photoshop fan 🙋‍♀️

Nostalgia brought to you by TikTok’s wes45678 to celebrate Adobe’s 40th anniversary! pic.twitter.com/Y8QEtcJawf

— Adobe (@Adobe) December 12, 2022

PDF to cloud to homegrown tech titan: Adobe celebrates 40th anniversary

“What if you could just focus on what’s being said, instead of how it sounds?” Sounds good to me. 🥁

I had the chance to grab breakfast with Figma founder & CEO Dylan Field a couple of weeks ago, and I found him to be incredibly modest and down to earth. He reminded me of certain fellow Brown CS majors—the brilliant & gracious founding team of Adobe After Effects. I can’t wait for them all to meet someday soon.

In any case, I really enjoyed the hour-long interview Dylan did with Nilay Patel of The Verge. Here’s hoping that the Adobe deal goes through as planned & that we get to do great things together!

Happy day to all who celebrate. 😌

The whole thread is hilarious & well worth a look:

You can take Maverick out of the Tomcat, but you can’t take the tom cat out of Maverick. 😸

[Via CAPT Chris Peppel, USN]

98% unrelated, but possibly amusing:

“Everything Is A Remix,” right? Or, if you prefer, it’s an homage—as Star Wars arguably was to The Dambusters. Anyway, genius steals, blah blah, and this is a fun set of juxtapositions & tropes:

What the what? From Sébastien Deguy, founder of Allegorithmic & now VP 3D & Immersive at Adobe:

I don’t communicate often about that other part of my activities, but I am so glad I could work with one of my all time favorites that I have to 🙂 My latest track, featuring Raekwon (Wu-Tang Clan) is available on all streaming platforms! Like here on Spotify.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, it slaps! 👏

If this sounds like your kind of jam, read on! From the job description:

What you’ll do:

• Share your knowledge, passion and experience of Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects with video makers.
• Engage daily with communities around professional video wherever they are (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) in two-way conversations, representing Adobe.
• Be active and visible within the community, build long term relationships and trust, and demonstrate that knowledge and understanding of the users to help Adobe internally.
• Build relationships with leaders in the identified communities.
• Establish yourself as a leader through your work and participation in time-sensitive topics and conversations.
• Answer questions and engage in discussion about Adobe products and policies with a heavy focus on newcomers to the ecosystem.
• Encourage others through sharing your personal use of and experimentation with professional video tools.
• Enable conversation, build content and speak about Adobe tools to address the specific audience needs.
• Understand the competitive landscape and promptly report accordingly.
• Coordinate with other community, product, marketing and campaign teams to develop mini-engagements and activities for the community (i.e. AMAs with the product team on Reddit, or community activities and discussions via live streams, etc.)
• Work closely with the broader community team, evangelism team, and product teams to provide insight and feedback to advocate for the pro video community within Adobe and to help drive product development direction.

Two roles (listed as being based in NYC & Denver) are now open. Check out the descriptions from the team:

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As a key member and thought-leader on this team, you’ll be an integral part of exploring and influencing the next generation of Adobe’s creative tools. Together, we are forging a new class of experience standards for desktop, mobile, and web products for years to come.

You will (among other things):

• Seek/design the “simple” experiences and interactions that influence our growing portfolio of creative tools. Empower users to delight themselves.
• Partner closely with fellow senior designers, product managers, senior engineers, and other leaders across different teams to bring new products to life.
  

What you’ll bring to the team

Must-Haves

• A minimum of 5 years of industry experience in product design with a proven track record of success
• Experience (and a love of!) solving complex design and technology problems using systems thinking
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate a multi-level problem space and strategy behind design decisions
• Creative and analytical skills to advocate for and support research, synthesize, and communicate insights that encourage design opportunities and product strategy
• Passion for understanding how creative people do what they do and how technology plays a role in the creative process
• Experience establishing user experience patterns across mobile, web, and desktop products within connected platforms

My video teammates (including the one I married) are attempting some groundbreaking, audacious stuff, and this newly open gig is a great chance to dive in with them:

This role will lead projects across various workflows from editing, audio, color, graphics and motion. You will bring your future-looking ideas to life with your designs, prototypes, and storytelling toolkit. You are a strong advocate for the customer because you can relate to their needs and understand the power of design and story to transform.

You will use your experience in post-production and experience design to paint the future vision of the products, but also love getting down into the details of shipping new builds and setting the example for shipping work with high quality.

Just weird & silly enjoy to share here; enjoy!

It’s been great to connect my former Google & Adobe teammates, helping them deepen the companies’ ongoing efforts to build up Web tech & enable deployment of demanding apps like Photoshop. Meanwhile the PS team has been working to make the app accessible everywhere:

The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions. […]

“I want to see Photoshop meet users where they’re at now,” [Maria] Yap says. “You don’t need a high-end machine to come into Photoshop.”

Recently Atari creator Nolan Bushnell reflected on the 50th anniversary of the company, giving me occasion to reflect on how Atari’s decline very indirectly paved the way to my joining Photoshop. Here, 10 (!) years after I first shared it, is the brief story:

The stars aligned Monday, and two of my favorite creative people, Russell Brown & Panic founder Cabel Sasser, got to meet. Cabel (who commissioned Panic’s awesome homage to 1982-style video game art) was in town for a classic games show, and as we passed Russell’s office, I pointed out the cutout display for Atari’s notorious 1982 video game “E.T.” Russell had worked at Atari back then, and I rather gingerly asked, “Uh, didn’t that game kinda suck?”

“Oh yes!” said Russell–and thank goodness it did: if it hadn’t, Russell (and hundreds of others) wouldn’t have gotten laid off, and he wouldn’t have gone to Apple (where he met his future wife) and from there gone to “this little startup called ‘Adobe.'”

If that hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have snatched my neck off the chopping block in ’02: I was days from being laid off post-LiveMotion, and it’s because Russell saw my “farewell” demo at his ADIM conference that he called the execs to say, “Really–we’re canning this guy…?” And, of course, had that not happened, I likely wouldn’t have met Cabel, wouldn’t have been introducing him & Russell, wouldn’t be talking to you now.

Of course, we joked, if it weren’t for the three of us talking just then, we’d be off experiencing some wonderful life-changing strokes of serendipity right now–but so it goes. 🙂

Hmm… for $800 (!) the quality had better represent a big leap over existing hardware like the One X2. The lack of comparisons in vids like this isn’t filling me with confidence:

Although it’s just one piece of a large puzzle, the Content Authenticity Initiative is working to help toolmakers add content credentials that help establish the original of digital media & disclose what edits have been done to it.

If you make imaging-related tools, check out this in-depth workshop exploring Adobe’s three open-source products for adding CAI support:

Content credentials, currently integrated into Adobe Photoshop, will now be available for other products and services through three simple open-source tools. Dave Kozma, Eric Scouten, and Gavin Peacock from the CAI team will show off the new JavaScript SDK, Rust Toolkit, and Command Line Utility. CAI Lead Product Designer and C2PA UX Task Force Co-Chair Pia Blumenthal will walk through the UX guidelines, use cases, and trust signals these new tools enable.

Adobe & partners in fighting disinformation have continued to grow their ranks, and it’s great to see the Associated Press coming on board:

With reporting from 250 locations around the world, AP is a key addition to the CAI’s mission to help consumers everywhere better understand the provenance and attribution of images and video. 

“We are pleased to join the CAI in its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation around photojournalism,” said AP Director of Photography David Ake. “AP has worked to advance factual reporting for over 175 years. Teaming up to help ensure the authenticity of images aligns with that mission.”  

We are building some rad stuff (seriously, I wish I could show you already) and would love to have you join us:

We are looking for a versatile and passionate Senior Developer to join us and help drive full stack, complex component implementation. You’ll play a key role in architectural discussions, defining solutions, and solving highly technical issues. Our team builds both cloud services (Python, and C++) and web experiences (Javascript, typescript, web Components, etc …) . The winning candidate for this high impact role requires a deep knowledge about cloud-based architectures as well as a solid CS fundamentals.

Some key responsibilities:

• Architect efficient and reusable full-stack systems that can support several different deep learned models
• Design, architect, and implement multiple low-latency micro-services (we mostly use JavaScript, C++, and Python)
• Building simple, robust, and scalable platforms used by many external users
• Work closely with UX designers, Product managers, Machine Learning engineers to develop compelling experiences
• Take a project from scoping requirements through the actual launch

I love this kind of TL;DR—including discussion of Docs automating the creation of TL;DRs!

I generally really enjoyed HBO’s Peacemaker series—albeit, as I told the kids, if even I found the profanity excessive, insofar as “too much salt spoils the soup.” I really enjoyed the whacked-out intro music & choreography:

Here the creators give a peek into how it was made:

And here a dance troupe in Bangladesh puts their spin on it: