Creative Quarterly Event
From 2018 to 2020, I developed and ran Creative Quarterly, a series of live, in-house events for Adobe's creative marketing department, alongside co-creator Hajdeja Ehline; together we organized, maintained, and moderated the series. Each installment brought artists and musicians from a range of disciplines, not necessarily tied to Adobe products, into an intimate room to talk through their creative process: what they do, how they do it, and the people and experiences that shaped their work. Guests included Michael Gillette, Micah Rivera, Beatrice Santiccioli, John Vanderslice, and Setta Studio.
The goal was simple: build community inside the marketing organization by pulling people out of their daily tasks for a moment of real inspiration, in a setting small enough, around 30 attendees, to feel personal. It was designed to sit apart from Adobe's other creative programming: MAX aims for scale, drawing roughly 15,000 attendees to inspire and demo Adobe's tools; 99U runs at about 1,000 attendees, intersecting the Behance community with Adobe products to give emerging artists career advice; Discover is a purely online resource pairing Adobe's learning content with curated creative influencers. Creative Quarterly filled the gap those left open: something intimate, live, and not tethered to product.
I also pitched a path to grow it further: building out a fuller library of speaker content, synopses and video in the spirit of NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, expanding the series across Adobe's departments worldwide, giving it a persistent presence in Adobe Studio's monthly newsletter, and bringing it to MAX itself through speaker panels, small-group roundtables with past speakers, and a screening room showing short recaps of the year's talks followed by meet-and-greets. The idea behind scaling it was to put Adobe Studio in a stronger design-leadership position, both within the internal community and in front of Adobe's executives.
In all, Creative Quarterly ran six events, five speaker sessions and one hands-on creative challenge led by a moderator, averaging 30 people each. The series ended when Covid sent everyone home in 2020, but leadership had seen its impact: they funded monthly online inspiration content and speaker sessions from It's Nice That to carry it forward.
Credits
John Caponi / Senior Creative Director / Developed, organized, and moderated the series; authored the growth strategy
Hajdeja Ehline / Creative Director / Co-developed, organized, and moderated the series; poster designer
