Espresso: The Italian king of coffee, a hallmark of all things caffeinated, the heart of the beloved latte, cortado, americano, et cetera. It’s espresso I order on this dreary morning in Miami Beach, desperately clinging to consciousness that was hanging in a state of suspension after a red-eye out of SLC left us on the road in a rental from 5:30 AM until our check-in at 3:00 PM at the Cardozo Hotel. Espresso that shared a historic heartbeat with a particular Italian here in the News Cafe, the last spot visited by the one and only Gianni Versace before his assassination at the steps of his Ocean Drive home.
Miami Beach is a place whose entire existence screams to the sea like a neon paradise glistening at the edge of white shores and green palms like a blinking Vegas billboard, “Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, LIVE TONIGHT”. What seems an innocuous, horribly humid grease pit whose washed-out pastel buildings and damp alleys might signal a place past prime, the moment the sun sets behind the ceramic roof tiles the vibrant magenta, chartreuse, and cyan lights come on and you recognize the organs of the street are still alive and well, perhaps just hungover like a vampire in the sun just four hours earlier. Every other body passing by is a whisper of a better night and a worse tomorrow, party favors for the hotel if you’ve got enough cash on hand, and the shine of a renegade at the edge of your eye. But while Miami Beach has its fair share of big city parties, I’m here for a different degree of bash this year: Attending the premiere design event, Adobe MAX.
So without dithering on longer about the ups and downs of Beach life itself, I’ll cut straight to the chase with my critique of the conference hosted by designers, for designers, and the abyssal chasm between those two distinctions–that is, the valley of the shadow of death between end-user/consumers of Adobe products, and the developers behind the scenes at the big house. The first event is a keynote to welcome everyone to the event, corporate pandering by executives who, admittedly, do a fucking fantastic job at reciting their scripts. The greatest riddle I find myself pondering in any of these executive speeches is if they think we’re actually buying the bullshit on “Artificial Intelligence is a tool for, not a replacement of, human creativity”, while stock values rise with promises of time savings on the ground level to make labor less costly. Nervously the audience claps back at the end of every point, and as the event continues we find that when announcing new functions within their Creative Suite, only one would capture the adoration of the crowd, an Illustrator enhancement to Grouped Objects and their interactions with Paths, which a keen eye would readily point out, “hey that’s already in the Astute Plugin, I think they’re just taking that?”
The “Inspiration Keynote” takes off with pointlessly dramatic garbage engineered to make pseudo-creatives feel “different”–the crowd in the halls you can pick out like weeds in which everyone’s a character and no one is unique–weepy words and empowering speeches lead to rolling eyes and ugly sighs. And when you think the folks throwing the party couldn’t get any more cringe, they pull out a nervous wreck of a host whose Genz humor focused on self-deprecation lands flat with the audience already anxious to see what “sneaks” we might get, grabbing their flasks in anticipation of the drinking game where you take a shot every time you hear “Generative AI” mentioned. Doubling down on the awkwardness is a celebrity appearance in our co-host Awkwafina, whose perplexed facial expressions and nervous gestures let us know that Adobe practically threw her out to the dogs without any kind of direction for the job at all, and even though she gave it her best on the stage the complete lack of chemistry or even genuine soul of the Adobe host made it a miserable spectacle to behold.
Then it all begins, sneak after sneak we’re all made to believe we might have powers of divination as each and every engineer–who honestly did a great job presenting these alpha projects despite their programming instability–shows off the latest and uncanny greatest in how Artificial Intelligence is swooping in to destroy all the creative process many of us took pleasure in, studied years to learn, or felt the understanding and mastery of which gave a certain kind of rite of passage from student to professional. Take for example Adobe’s Project Turntable which, with the click of a button, generates a 2Dimesional character into a 3D object, enabling the user to change the perspective of a scene with just a few sliders. Even my boss’s boss–an incredibly talented illustrator who has worked in the creative space for decades–felt his typically cheerful demeanor disrupted and perturbed by this mockery of figure drawing and perspective study.
Running up and down stairs earning an average daily of 6 miles traveled between my sessions on Social Media, Typography, Marketing and Motion Graphics, I swerve between the countless booths of sponsors and vendors in the main hall. What once a playground of freebies and giveaways is now booths for further Generative AI plugins, outsourcing, and children's carnival games slathered with a corporate finish to give a desperate sense of legitimacy to the charade while a massive middle-aged executive with jaundiced eyes sweats in his pallid gray suit, raspily shouting out raffle numbers to win a free tote bag filled with branded notepads and ballpoint pens. Forlorn artists whose styles are ubiquitously crafted to target designers, an epiphany I find as I scan across all the type spaced evenly over an arch, cats, an oddly large presence of astronauts, and of course, coffee.
Coffee; it’s drinking coffee from the half-empty canisters that tethers me back to this group I belong to, coffee that brings me back down from this filthy air of arrogance that I’ve found myself floating in, disgusted by the endless promotion of AI and its dirty footsteps over everything that I’ve held dear as a career graphic designer. It’s the coffee that ties me back to how much I actually love this place with these people: the locals working the event with whom I trade stories about travel, tension, and love. The professionals, whose passions and talents all make my own feel inadequate, inspire me to do more and be a better designer. The teachers, whose knowledge of the programs I use daily still blows my mind, within five minutes of a lesson I’m left impressed that I can still learn more about these products I could navigate blindfolded.
After all this, despite the dreary state that I find the graphic design industry in, I realize that I love being a designer, that it’s what I’ve always wanted and loved, and what I want to continue learning about. Typography, layout, photography, motion and illustration, all aspects of this lifestyle I had envisioned early in my life that I would have expected to be a master of by now; a dramatic flash in the form of revelation sears through my being, and maybe it’s just that the coffees are starting to add up but it’s been over 11 years since I finished college and it’s probably been that long since I’ve been proud to call myself a graphic designer at all, and god damn it I’m starting to feel inspired after all.
