Creative Director of Adobe Speaks On Harnessing the Creative Community

By Allison Belcher
SXSW Press Team

John Caponi, a Creative Director at Adobe, spoke on Friday about the successes, improvements and insights of Adobe as a whole.

After graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design, a prestigious art and design school in Georgia, Caponi first started his career out at Yellow Pages designing advertisements for the featured companies. After deciding Yellow Pages wasn’t right for him, Caponi changed careers and started designing t-shirts for Woodlands, focusing his design work on music and bands. After a while of working for Woodlands, Caponi once again switched careers and landed a job working for Adobe Studio, designing packaging, imagery and campaigns.

Caponi spent much of his panel talking about Adobe’s philosophy, product identity, brand and marketing. Adobe Studio is THE software to rely on when it comes to creating your best work possible. From Photoshop to Dreamweaver, Audition to InDesign, Adobe is your reliable big brother when it comes to designing, creating and editing your work.

“Adobe’s philosophy is that art is subjective, so it’s not about who likes it. As a company, Adobe wants to support the artistic community. In order to do this, we are constantly creating tools for the creative community,” Caponi said.

Adobe is powered by its creative users, so in turn Adobe Studio aims to give back to the artistic community that utilizes their products. Adobe focuses on building closer connections to its users. In order to achieve this, Adobe uses amazing art pieces by lesser known artists for their suites and software startup pages. Adobe has tightened connections to its users by marketing a “Dream On” campaign featuring artists and designers that don’t always have a voice. Behance, a website that acts as an online portfolio, partners with Adobe and helps get great artistic work discovered. Adobe has also worked on projects such as building an ad campaign for Feed, a company that sells fashions bags made of environmentally friendly materials. The profits collected from selling the bags go towards helping feed hungry people all over the world. The campaign lasted seven days and involved six creatives. The “Feed” project (#AdobeFeed) promoted Adobe’s ambitions toward becoming a more socially involved company. Another campaign that Adobe worked on was their “I am the New Creative” campaign, emerging from inspiration from the film “Bully,” a documentary bringing attention to the effects of bullying. The campaign got artists to to do self portraits of themselves to create a mural image for Bully’s campaign. The portraits were influenced and inspired by the film, giving artists and designers an opportunity to express their opinion and feelings on the subject matter in a creative way. Adobe’s campaigns like Feed and Bully are huge inspirations in the redesigning of its brand and social work.

While Adobe’s brand is described as “corporate and defensive” by Caponi, the seed of something new has sprouted and Adobe has been working on becoming “less corporate” and more personal. The bottom line is that creativity still matters. When you have a community and collaborate with artists from all over the world, you do things a little differently.