2017 Adobe CC Design Updates Every Designer Needs to Know

At Adobe’s creative conference, MAX 2017, they announced a host of efficiency updates for each of the Creative Cloud (CC) apps this year. There are some exciting new developments, new apps, as well as user-driven updates in the form of Adobe CC updates 2017 that make life a whole lot easier while designing. Adobe has also geared up for the future with some AI integrations and VR experience design features.

While a book could be written about each of these updates, and probably already has been, we’ll be doing an overview to get you started. Trust us, if you’re a design creative, there are some really cool updates you’ll want to dig deeper to get their full effect. Let’s take a closer look:

1. Sensei: One of the hottest things to hit the Adobe platform since the launch of its creative cloud edition, is Sensei—Adobe’s AI and unified learning framework that now powers the CC. Sensei is the Japanese word for respected leader or teacher, so it’s an apt name from a company who’s been a force to reckon with in the creative world since the early 80’s. What so amazing about Sensei is its ability to not only search trillions of creative assets, but it can understand their meaning, search for similar documents, as well as anticipate your next move as a designer. Sounds pretty amazing, right? That’s because it is. Sensei can quickly and easily sift through the data in images, identifying facial landmarks such as eyes, eyebrows, lips, nose, etc. to allow you to change the look or expression with a single click. It can recreate fonts, turn scanned documents into editable digital files, and much more. If you haven’t tested out its capabilities yet, now’s the time to get started.
2. Photoshop CC: Recently updated in October 2017 – this new Adobe CC update 2017 features pretty much rock. They include expanded photo support with Sensei incorporated deep-learning–led, face-aware Liquify features, as well as access to your Adobe Lightroom photos right inside Photoshop’s Start workspace. There are a number of brush-related features, including stroke smoothing, and brush management—which now allows you to sort brushes into nested folders, a zoom slider to view more or less brushes in the screen space, and more. The list doesn’t stop there—you’ll also find updates for adjusting fonts, super quickly share documents, a new curvature pen tool, path color options, awesome new copy-paste updates we’ve all been looking for, and some awesome rich tooltips for learning on the go. Sensei also assists with up-scaling images for preserving important details without distortion, as well as detecting patterns and even filling in content that doesn’t exist by sampling the nearby pixels.
3. Lightroom CC: This year marks a leap in the Lightroom—Photoshop experience as Lightroom goes completely cloud-based. In previous updates, Lightroom did go by the moniker of Lightroom CC—but it was still a desktop focused experience—and one they are now calling Lightroom Classic CC. With this new version, the updates are cloud-based and set to make editing, organizing, storing, and sharing images easier than ever. This means you can now edit your photos with awesome quick adjustment tools from not just your desktop, but mobile devices, the web, or right at your desktop. Edits from one device are automatically applied, so you can always pick up from where you left off—regardless of where you want to continue work.
4. Illustrator CC: Illustrator released some great new features this past October, as well. In this latest edition, you’ll find access to multiple workflows, upgraded user experience, and performance improvements. Some of the most notable include: a new Puppet Warp tool to transform vector images, an updated Properties panel for faster, more intuitive access, the same updates for variable fonts found in Photoshop’s update, as well as access to create up to 1,000 artboards on a single canvas, and more.
5. InDesign CC: This year, InDesign has expanded the ability to work more efficiently and create multipage layouts. It’s also made adding endnotes to long documents a breeze, as well as new paragraph border updates, a host of PDF accessibility enhancements, and much more.
6. Premiere Pro CC: The new Premiere Pro CC released in October 2017, introduces collaboration features, cutting-edge 360/VR workflows and immersive VR editing with a head-mount display, as well as responsive motion graphics control with templates available in Adobe Stock and After Effects. In fact, you even can use After Effects-created motion graphics templates without installing AE. There’s a lot to uncover, and After Effects has made learning even easier with a new Getting Started experience to help users uncover their flow in no time.
7. After Effects CC: After Effects has gotten even more powerful this year as the new updates improve the efficiency in motion graphics creation, streamline the ability to make data-driven graphics, and high-quality immersive VR/3D video experiences. You can even change the way you work with keyboard editing with the new keyboard shortcut editor to assign shortcuts to suit your process. It also has an updated Getting Started experience to make learning the program a snap for those who are new. It’s never been easier to use this powerful application.
8. Stock CC: This affordable stock asset warehouse is expanding its collections of high-quality images, graphics, videos, and templates. It’s eve including hundreds of motion graphics templates, as well as 3D assets. If you haven’t tested out assets yet, now might be a good time to start.
9. New CC applications: In addition to Lightroom being remade for the complete cloud experience, there are three other new applications to add to the Adobe CC roster. They include Adobe XD CC (for UX/UI experience design), Adobe Dimension CC (for 2D to 3D compositing), and Adobe Character Animator CC (for 2D animation).

As you can see, there’s a lot to dig into and add to your list of essential design tools this year. Fortunately, with Adobe’s new Getting Started experiences rapped in Adobe CC updates 2017, anyone from a novice to a seasoned professional should have no problem getting on track. Artwork Abode continues to monitor and test out all of the Adobe updates as they happen so we can maintain an informed and experience design team. Contact us today to learn how our designers can use these latest updates for your next project.

– Artwork Abode