At the beginning of this month, mark-makers Russ and Mark clocked out early, and headed into Shoreditch to get up close and personal with the latest features of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

The event was part of Adobe’s Create Now World Tour. It was designed to showcase new features across the company’s latest software update, and to give creative in the industry a platform to share experiences and inspiration.

The mm* blog caught up with Mark and Russ to learn all about it, and here are their highlights, both from the event, and from the Creative Cloud updates.

The speakers

Mme Peripetie, Image Maker, on Photography

Madame Peripetie was a policital scientist who went back to school to study photography. Noticed almost immediately for the ugly-yet-beautiful, contradictory nature of her work and compositions, she has since developed work in other media and describes herself as an Image Maker. Her talk was centred around the creative process, in particular the feedback that the Behance community gives to creatives who publish their work. Her message was a positive one: creativity is a muscle, all it needs to develop is exercise.

Matthew Maxwell, Digital Creative at Imagination, on Design

Newly instated at Imagination, Matther Maxwell is interested in bridging the language barrier between humans and computers. Imagination are working towards emotionally intelligent interactions between humans and computers. He discussed a project that involved measuring the dimensions and colours of human faces , and assigning notes to each value, creating music out of the information in a person’s face.

The features

These range from the exciting and novel to basic bugfixes. Here are 3 that we are enjoying, for both pragmatic and creative reasons:

• Ink & Slide
  Adobe Ink & Slide is a set of creative hardware for digital sketching and drawing on the iPad. Ink is pressure-sensitive and precise, and slide is a digital ruler that also helps with circles and curves. Cool pieces of kit.

• Simplified Tables
  On a more prosaic note, it’s now possible to drag and drop table columns and rows in InDesign. Trust us when we say that this is an important, exciting and useful update!

• Creative Cloud for Mobile
  Adobe have developed several new mobile apps, and we’re particularly impressed with Creative Cloud for mobile. It allows creatives to keep all of their files in one place, and take them out and about. This is fantastically useful for lots of reasons, the main one being new freedom to take the creative process away from the desk. Files are accessible wherever the user is, facilitating easy collaboration and sharing with clients.

The point

For Adobe, the event was designed to showcase more general developments as well as new tools. Integrating applications together in order to streamline a creative’s workflow is very important going forward. There is a shift towards incorporating mobile early on in, or even at the start of, the creative process. Developments in Adobe social applications like Behance will ensure that the creative community which has been growing, collaborating and creating together for years continues to have a good platform for expression and feedback.