It’s never been easier to make an image. Even for people who don’t consider themselves creative, translating an idea into an illustration, graphic, video—any format, really—is now as simple as typing a prompt into a box (quality not guaranteed).
Adobe knows this. The company, which has long been the tool of choice for professional creatives, is now looking to “aggressively acquire the next generation of Adobe loyalists,” as the outgoing CEO, Shantanu Narayen, put it during a recent earnings call. That means bringing the not-so-creative among us into the fold with tools like Firefly AI and Adobe Express. Even its professional-grade tools are eyeing novice creatives with AI agents that make navigating complex tools easier.
The strategy appears to be working. So far this year, Adobe has increased the number of “Creative freemium” users—people using free versions of Firefly and Adobe Express—by 70%, reaching 100 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, its professional-focused business remains healthy and growing, though at a slower rate (15% year over year as of Q3).
As Adobe kicks off its biggest event of the year with its Adobe Max conference, Fast Company spoke with Eric Snowden, Adobe’s SVP of design, about what this push into freemium means for the way his team thinks about designing tools, the challenges of bringing Adobe products into third-party apps like ChatGPT, and why this might truly be the most exciting time to be a designer. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fast Company: For the last few years, Adobe has really pushed its identity as a company that makes creative tools for everyone—not just professional designers, but also people who don’t necessarily consider themselves designers at all. I’d love to understand what the business imperative for that broader definition of a creator is to you and Adobe more broadly.
Eric Snowden: I think this has been a trend for Adobe for longer than the last few years. I mean, if you go back and look at things like Elements and other products, we’ve been trying to bring creativity to more and more people for many years. And I think between technology that’s come up—mobile and now AI—we can just go broader and broader than we’ve ever been able to do before. Adobe’s really been about empowering people to express themselves and to communicate in new ways. And that’s been at the core of our company’s mission for a long time. We’re just able to do that in ways we haven’t been able to do before.
I think it’s been accelerated, but I don’t know that it’s a completely new thing for us. And I think you’re seeing more and more people want to do this, right? I think whether it’s through social media or other forums, people want to express themselves in new ways, and they’ve got new forums to do that. And so, as demand has grown, I think we’ve really wanted to meet that demand for a broader audience.
Back in June, your outgoing CEO said, “We believe now is the time to aggressively acquire the next generation of Adobe loyalists.” And to just kind of push that idea a little bit more, why is that so important?
We have an easier on-ramp now than we’ve ever had before. I think whether it’s products like Express that anyone can pick up and use, or it’s the new technology, like agents or other things we brought into our flagship tools, . . . it’s just easier to be creative than it’s ever been.
I started using Adobe products when I was a teenager. I’ve always been a big believer that people pick their first creative tools when they’re really young, and we have a lot of data around that. . . . Maybe they become a creative, and maybe they don’t. But it’s something that people start pretty young, and so we want to make sure that we’ve got a really great on-ramp for folks who want to be creative.
For me, it was creating posters and websites for the band I was in, and I didn’t know that was going to lead me into being the SVP of design at Adobe. I didn’t even know design was a career at that point, but I think that on-ramp exposed me to this entire world that I didn’t know existed.
Obviously the on-ramp that you experienced is very different from the on-ramp a 14-year-old might experience today. How would you characterize that difference? How are you trying to reach that younger generation of potential creative?
There are so many different ways. One is, where they can express themselves is extremely different. I didn’t have social networks or other places to express myself. I think that’s a big part of it. At the time, we only had high-end professional specialist tools, and so I was using Photoshop to make a poster for a band that felt a little bit like taking a 747 to go to the grocery store. It was just overkill for what I needed. I think today I might have used something like Adobe Express to do that, but that could have introduced me in a much easier way and an on-ramp to the things I need today.
But I also love the approach we’re taking with agents inside of our professional tools, because it feels like a guide that can bring you into something like Photoshop or even After Effects. I was playing with the After Effects agent a week or so ago, and the beauty of it is you can prompt your way into the product, but under the hood, it is still After Effects. I liken it to a self-driving car where it’s doing its thing, but at any moment you can drive the wheel and you have full control. It’s got all of the layers and all the keyframes and the easings and everything underneath it, so at any moment where you want to get in and tweak every knob and dial, that’s there for you.
Most of us at Adobe, we think a lot about how we learned Adobe’s products and how we can make that easier. That’s something that has stuck in my head for the entirety of my time at Adobe. And I think a lot about how we make it easier for someone to learn these tools than it was for me, because the ceiling is so high in these tools, which is the beauty of them. But we want to make that first step or two into them as seamless and as low as possible.
So what does that look like? Can you give me a good example of how you’ve made the accessibility clear?
Yeah, one of the things I just mentioned, right? Bringing agents into our tools, I think, is one way. Another way is, there are brand new tools that are easier to pick up that are specialized. So, something like using Adobe Fresco on the iPad for drawing. It’s on a specialized device that is great for working in that way. It’s a tool that is dedicated for that use case. There are also things in our flagship tools. Like one example I always give is the properties panel in Illustrator, and this is getting a little nerdy, but we took all of these different panels and combined them into a single panel, right? We didn’t take away anything. All those other panels already exist, but we gave people a single place to access most of the things they need, and that just simplifies getting to know a product when you come in for the first time. But it actually doesn’t take anything away from our power users.
One of the the fun, but also really hard, tensions of this job is: How do you change things in our existing tools to make it easier for new people to onboard without disrupting the fact that professionals have very specific, bespoke workflows that if you change a a pixel or two, you can really throw them off of their game. It’s like it’s a musical instrument to them. You can’t move the keys on a keyboard—it’s the same thing, and so I think it’s about finding that balance. And so it’s something we’re thinking about all the time, like across the portfolio.
I would love to understand how your team designs a single product for someone who has never opened Photoshop, let’s say, and for someone who’s used it for like 20 years, right? Are those two different products in your mind? Two different experiences?
I’m glad you brought that up as an example because we recently launched this AI-assisted mode in Photoshop, and I think the goal with that is to have a dedicated place that people can land who have never used Photoshop before. It’s very simplified; an AI-centric experience, like a workspace where they can go in and they can prompt their way to editing their image, but they are still in the context of Photoshop. It is one click away to get the more full-featured interface, and there’s sort of this interplay between the two where they can graduate from this simple interface into the full interface.
Now they don’t have to do that, right? They could have a full editing experience in this simplified interface, and people can go from the more complex interface into the simplified one if they wanted to. But I think it’s about bringing them into the entire tool, giving them an experience that you know. Again, it’s about that first step or two. It’s like: What is that day one experience like, and giving them something they feel like they can digest and they get a result that they’re proud of as quickly as possible.
I was a Photoshop teacher at Parsons [School of Design] for a number of years, and when I was teaching Photoshop, it was really about how do I spend the least amount of time possible to get someone to have an image that comes out the other end that they feel proud of. Because once they did that, they were willing to invest the time to learn the breadth and depth of one of the most powerful pieces of software on the planet. You can do anything in Photoshop. That’s the beauty of it. And so it’s about how do we give them that success as quickly as possible, and then we sort of guide them through the rest of it and show them the depth of this kind of amazing tool.
Earlier this year Jesus Diaz wrote about how Adobe is rolling out a new integration for ChatGPT, which effectively lets users, @ Adobe in ChatGPT’s interface, and then use natural language to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, pulling from the capabilities from across Creative Cloud apps.
What was interesting to me about that announcement was that it was sort of an acknowledgement that many of the people who are new to Adobe products are not going to use them in the same way, or onboard in the same way, that you all are accustomed to. As someone who is designing these products, I’m curious what challenges it creates for you and your team when somebody has access to Creative Cloud through third-party apps like Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini?
We think a lot about continuity across experiences because, to your point, there will be some people that are introduced to it through ChatGPT, and then do experience it through our flagship applications. We want to make sure they have an experience that doesn’t feel like they have to start over when they come into our products. We talk a lot about skills transfers—this idea that if they build a skill in one place and they go to a second place, that skill is something that was a good investment for them that they can build on top of. We want to make sure that the pieces of the interface that we bring into these third parties, as they learn those, those things are valuable to them as they progress.
We also realize there will be some people that will stay in ChatGPT. There will be some people that go the other direction—people who are using our flagship tools and then find it in ChatGPT want to make sure the skills transfer goes the other way. And so that continuity of experience is one part of it. But I think the most important thing, and the thing that is unique about Adobe’s approach to all of this, is we’re a workflow company. People aren’t usually coming to us to use a single feature, a single product. They are trying to accomplish a goal, and they are often using a product or a couple of products to accomplish something much larger.
And so we need to make sure that all of this stuff works together, whether it’s a couple of Adobe tools or an Adobe tool and a third-party tool. Because as a workflow company, that’s what people expect from us and often come to us for. That can be a challenge when you don’t control the full end to end, but that’s something we’re really trying to make sure we get right for our customers.
Talking about the freemium model, your freemium monthly active users have increased a lot over the past year. How does that change the way that you think about designing Adobe’s products? And how are you thinking about graduating them into a paid tier?
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it goes back to the previous challenge of new users, and they’re tied together, even though freemium doesn’t always equate to new. But it is about giving people value and feeling an accomplishment as soon as possible. And in a freemium model, you’re allowed to give them that without having to have a sign-in or a paywall be the first thing that someone experiences.
When people think of Photoshop, they do think of this sort of unlimited potential, but they still don’t even know what is possible with Photoshop. And so, the more we can show them what these tools are capable of, the more we can get them excited. And I think in these new models, we’re allowed to show them more of that before we ask them to sign up or to pay for something. That is beneficial to Adobe, right? We can show them like the magic that we can give to them; that’s really exciting to be able to show versus tell, and I think the freemium model allows us to do more of that.
It’s a real value exchange with a customer. At some point, we’re saying, ‘give us either your email or your money,’ and it’s clear what value we’re exchanging with them. And I think doing that at the right time, that’s when conversion happens. If you’re doing that at the wrong time, I think that makes conversion more difficult. That is a design challenge to figure out, when does that handshake happen? I think you get the best conversion numbers where there’s the right there’s the right balance. If you have it too far on one side, the user feels like they haven’t gotten enough to warrant whatever you’re asking them to do. And if it’s too far on the other side, that’s not good for the business. And so I think it’s about finding that right balance where everyone benefits from that exchange.
It’s an interesting time to be talking about this with the Canva news [last] week, with the company laying off or restructuring around 22% of its workforce. Part of those pressures, it seems, comes from the pressures of building a product that caters to a very large base of people who use the tool for free, but are also using very compute-intensive features. Obviously, Adobe has a different business model. You’re a completely different company—this is not apples to apples. But I’m curious because we’re here: What did that news reveal to you?
Yeah, it’s. I mean, it’s an interesting question. I mean, obviously we saw that news, but you know, I frankly try not to think about that too much. Canva’s doing interesting things out there, but I think we have to keep focused on what we’re doing, and I think we are doing something very different. I think we are a very different company. I mean, to your point, creativity is a piece of our business, but we have other massive lines of business that are connected to creativity. But they do one thing, and we do a multitude of things, and we do a multitude of things that are all interconnected. And so, it’s just kind of hard to make that comparison in a lot of ways.
One thing that I wanted to talk about is a data point that you all came up with in a survey from back in the summer about small business owners and creative marketing. It says the average small business owner fills five roles a day, adding up to 200 extra hours a year; 44% act as their own marketer; 41% act as social media manager, and 35% as creative director.
Those are pretty crazy numbers. It makes total sense to me that that’s the case, but just seeing the numbers kind of blows my mind. When did you all suspect this shift was happening,? Is this an AI-enabled change in the way that people run their businesses?
This shift has been happening for a while, but I think it’s been nearly impossible for people to keep up with this. Just the burden that’s put on these businesses, it’s pretty wild, and I think AI could be part of the solution to that.
But the demands and expectations on small businesses are also echoed in enterprises and everything else. Like the demand for content is at an all-time high, and it is growing. There’s just insane expectations for all these different channels . . . it just keeps scaling, keeps getting bigger and bigger. And I think that’s where the opportunity for us is to help, whether it’s tools like Express, where people can do some of this stuff themselves if they need to; whether it’s through agents; whether it’s through empowering professionals to do this work faster and better.
Our industry focuses a lot about productivity with AI, but we don’t talk enough about the fact that there are things that we can do now that we could not do before. Yes, all of us are being asked to do more, and yes, everybody’s being asked to work faster. But my team talks a lot about, what can we do now that we couldn’t do six months ago? The fact that we can build our own tools and our own plugins, or the fact that people who couldn’t do motion graphics can add that to their toolkit. I mean I think it’s really about not just the productivity part of AI, but raising the ceiling on either the breadth of work people can do, or the quality of work people can do. I think it’s about finding the balance between those two things in a lot of ways.
Your team can do things that it wasn’t able to do six months ago. Any thoughts on what you’d like to be able to do in six months that you can’t do now?
When it comes to my team in particular, I know there’s a lot of concern in the design community about what it means to be a product designer. I think that’s fair because the world is changing, and we all have to acknowledge that. But when I talk to my team, I think this is actually one of the most exciting times to be a product designer. In the past, if you were a designer and you had an idea that you were passionate about, you would have to convince someone to build that idea. Either find an engineering friend or a partner who was up for it, and convince them to help build a prototype with you, or convince a product manager who controlled engineering resources that this was a good idea.
You don’t really need to do that anymore. You can just build it yourself. I know people are founding companies where it’s a bunch of designers and a single engineer, and I think the power that designers have to go just do things on their own is unprecedented, and I mean that literally. I think as time goes on, that is going to just get greater. And so, if you project six months into the future, what people can build is going to be amazing.
I would say a good portion of the software that I run on my computer these days, whether it’s Photoshop plug-ins I built, or software that I’m using to to make myself more productive, I’ve written myself; bespoke things for me that is running alongside Adobe software that I use or connected to it to make myself more productive. That’s a really interesting world that we’re entering into, and I can see that accelerating. For product designers who really embrace that, that is an exciting new world, but it is a very different world than the one we’re living in today, or certainly one we’ve lived in historically. I think if people lean into that, there’s something really fascinating and interesting there—and fun.
I think we should occasionally talk about the fact that as a designer, being able to just build stuff is really fun. It reminds me of the Flash days of the internet where anything felt possible, and I haven’t felt that way in a long time.