June 17th is the day a new version of the Adobe Creative Cloud saw the light. I honestly think that if you are a creative professional, web designer, or web developer you should be as excited as I am about this. Let’s dig in and see why it’s something that will change the way we create.
What is Adobe Creative Cloud?
It is everything you need to create for the modern world, be it a graphical work, a digital painting, an amazing photo or video, a web site, or mobile app. It spans applications and services: Creative Cloud gives you everything you used to have in the Creative Suites plus new products, services, and workflows between these apps and services.
Adobe Creative Cloud helps you:
To create by giving you the best set of tools. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, and Edge Animate CC are just some of the tools that are part of Creative Cloud. Basically every service and product Adobe has is part of the Creative Cloud
To save and sync your work and tool settings across multiple devices/computers by using the file sharing and syncing services that are part of Creative Cloud.
To collaborate easily with your team. You can work together on the same files with your colleagues regardless of where you are.
To “publish” your work through app stores (using PhoneGap and Digital Publishing Suite) and the web.
To get inspired by thousands and thousands of creative people around the world using Behance. You can post to Behance directly from Illustrator and Photoshop.
To showcase your work in beautiful portfolios using Behance Pro Site.
To learn to use Creative Cloud apps you are not familiar with. As a paying member of the Creative Cloud you get access to video tutorials and articles that can help you learn to use new tools. Maybe you are a web designer or web developer and you want to be able to produce a high-quality video tutorial; by using the learning/training Creative Cloud resources you can learn how to use Premiere and After Effects.
Why Creative Cloud
When selling boxes, companies are required to release new features only in new versions of the software due to US revenue recognition regulations. This is fine when you are a company with only one or two apps. But for something like Creative Suite it meant that we were able to release a new version only every 18 – 24 months. This is how long we need to make sure we sync across all products and everyone was ready to ship – remember, missing the date means you have to wait for the next train.
By moving to a membership model we are allowed to update as often as we want/can. For example, in the past year we’ve updated the Creative Cloud:
Adding Photoshop Lightroom 4 to Creative Cloud in June 2012
Muse contact forms, Adobe Edge Animate preview update, Illustrator update in August 2012
Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition, Dreamweaver update, adding Edge Tools & Services in September 2012
New Photoshop features, Muse for mobile support, Adobe Game Developer Tools, Creative Cloud for teams, Creative Cloud Learn center in October 2012
Adding the first public preview of Edge Reflow CC, updating Edge Animate, Dreamweaver update, Behance integration, Adobe Muse update, and Lightroom 5 early 2013
Creative Cloud desktop app, Kuler for iPhone app, new learning/training content in June 13
And finally today, June 17th, we’ve updated with hundreds of new features all the creative apps – Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, Premiere CC, After Effects CC, InDesign CC, and so forth
Debunking Myths
Here are some things that are actually not true when talking about Adobe Creative Cloud:
Creative Cloud apps don’t run in your browser. You will download and run Photoshop, Illustrator, and the rest of the software on your machine the same way you used to in the past
You are not forced to update the apps if you don’t want
You don’t have to upload the files you create using Photoshop and friends to Creative Cloud. The file syncing service offers just a convenient way to share your projects across multiple computers and with different people. But you will always be able to save and load files to your local disk
If you don’t need all the apps/services part of the Creative Cloud then you can opt in for a membership just for one app at a lower price obviously
You don’t have to be connected to the Internet all the time in order to use the applications. The Internet connection is required only from time to time just to validate that your subscription is still on
Prices, membership types, geo availability
Just to clear up questions you may have about the price and the different type of membership you can choose from here is a short answer (for more details see this page).
There are five types of membership (I included the US prices to give you a reference):
Creative Cloud Free membership – 30-day app trials, 2 GB of cloud storage, limited access to services. It is free.
Creative Cloud Single App Individual membership – full version of the selected app, 20 GB of cloud storage, limited access to services. You can install the software on two different machines at the same time. It is $10.99 per month.
Creative Cloud Complete Individual – access to full version of all the apps, full access to all services, 20 GB of cloud storage. You can install the software on two different machines at the same time. It is $49.99 per month.
Creative Cloud Team membership (this is for teams and business) – get everything in Creative Cloud Complete Individual plus 100 GB of cloud storage, centralized billing/admin/deployment, and 2 expert services calls per seat. It is $69.99 per month.
Creative Cloud for Enterprise will come later this year. This is for customers who need a large number of seats. The price depends on each deal.
To get the exact price for your country go to http://creative.adobe.com/plans. In terms of what countries are supported right now, take a look at this document. In short, we support lots of countries from the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
There are some special offers going on right now, so make sure you check the options you have on Creative.Adobe.com. For example we have one for students/teachers.
Create Now World Tour
Probably the easiest way to get a firsthand experience on what Creative Cloud enables you to do is to attend one of the Create Now events we are doing around the world. You can find where the next one is here.
Conclusions
With Adobe Creative Cloud you always have access to the latest tools and features as soon as they become available. You can share your projects and tools preferences across multiple computers/devices. You can share your work with your team members or clients. You can find inspiration and showcase your work with Behance. You can create web sites, web apps, digital magazines, mobile apps, videos, edit photos, books, magazines, graphics, 3D objects …
And this is just the beginning of our journey. I know the product teams are hard working to enable new and incredible workflows between tools ultimately enabling you, the creators, to achieve more with less time and effort.