As part of Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, Adobe hosted two groups of attendees for a guided field trip at our newly opened Union Square studio in New York City. Participants ventured on a capture-walk, learned how to make a pattern in Adobe Illustrator, and got hands-on with building a music speaker out of paper.
And the main creative tool binding this whole process? Their cell phones.
Participants were asked to look at the world with an artistic eye by downloading and playing with Adobe Capture CC on their mobile devices—to turn their phones into a creativity canvas. Capture CC allows you to create color themes, vector shapes, video looks, and digital brushes with photos you take on your phone. For this particular exercise, we asked everyone to use the Shape function in Capture CC, which helps you make vector shapes in a snap.
All 300+ shapes captured during our sessions were saved in a shared CC Library, fueled by CreativeSync. Shapes uploaded automatically to the library as folks wandered around the streets of New York, capturing everything from sidewalk grating to flowers and typography on graphic stickers. Other people decided to stay indoors and draw instead, or found interesting objects to capture right in our office. With this mix of assets, we then showed everyone how to create cool patterns in Adobe Illustrator. These patterns were then saved and sent over to our infamous RISOgraph printer, which produced high quality prints on pop-up paper speaker templates created by Adobe Creative Resident Kelli Anderson.
While a lot of people may not think of themselves as an official “creative” or work in a particularly creative business, when they get the task of making something, they will almost always get excited about it. During this event, people from international backgrounds and a variety of industries put on their creative hats and get enthusiastic about making something fun and worthwhile.
The mobile landscape is evolving and allowing people to create with their everyday devices. If you ever wondered what it’d be like to draw on your phone, compile a wireframe, make a vector in seconds, or create cool visual effects with photo and video—play with Adobe’s mobile apps. You never know…you could make something truly amazing, or at least have some fun!
Check out the Behance project about the event, and follow us on Twitter at @AdobeDrawing and @CreativeCloud.