Just back from two days at Adobe MAX (I know MAX is a fake acronym and Deke and I toyed with making it “Max”; But I apparently got brainwashed by the giftbag, t-shirt, and MAX logo everywhere I turned for the past two days). Despite is unfortunately capitalized name, MAX going on in beautifully useasonably warm San Francisco. The theme for the show this year: Connect. Discover. Inspire. MAX is traditionally a developer heavy show, but this year many of the sessions were geared toward design-types. The keynote featured Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch, and the First Lady of California, Maria Shriver. This shot does not feature either of them.

While Adobe MAX can be a bit developer-focused, I did find an enclave of design types at Russell Brown’s ADIM@MAX (whatcha gonna do with those caps, Deke?) ADIM, as some of you may know, is Russell Brown’s notorious Art Director’s Invitational Master class where creativity and sometimes clothing run free. The ADIM@MAX version was a little tamer, only naked 3D dinosaurs running free, while the people remained clothed, perhaps in 3D dinosaur shirts they created during the two day class. The real benefit was of course that everyone in the seminar got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One, and the five people who accurately told me what object I am holding in the book (no, I am NOT that lady with the paddle at the end, sheesh!) won copies of Adobe InDesign One-on-One hot off the presses to-day. (I haven’t even removed the shrinkwrap on my copy yet.)

Russell always brings in speakers to inspire and illuminate during the ADIM session, one of whom was Tim Barber from design group Odopod who took the group through the creation of the truly bizzare and wonderful site they created for the Got Milk? folk: whitegoldiswhitegold.com.  Which features this interactive video: “Is it Me, or Do You Love My Hair?” You must check this out:

There were a couple of other announcements that I want to follow up with y’all on this week, stay tuned for more Massive Adobe Xcellence news.