Adobe MAX 2024
Adobe MAX 2024
Adobe Express × Jen Stark3957 Adobe MAX draws the creative world. Tens of thousands of designers, artists, and makers filling a convention floor where every brand is competing for the same attention. The question for Adobe Express wasn't how to stand out in that context — it was how to be genuinely worth stopping for. For the second year, we brought Adobe Express to MAX. This time in Miami. And this time with artist Jen Stark at the center of everything.
Stark came in at the beginning — not as a licensor, not as a finishing layer, but as a co-author of the visual identity. Her signature aesthetic: kaleidoscopic, layered, endlessly radiating color and form. Work that already feels like it wants to move. That instinct shaped every decision that followed.
The entry experience centered on a large-scale interactive LED installation where Stark's layered geometric forms filled the space floor to ceiling. A body-tracking camera read each guest's silhouette in real time, embedding them inside the animation — their outline disrupting the pattern, sending ripples and distortions through her shapes. Original sound design, developed in close collaboration with Stark during R&D sessions at our LA studio, made the space feel alive in every direction: proximity-based audio that built in intensity as guests approached, crystal bowls and synthesized tones tuned to the visual's movement.
The entry experience centered on a large-scale interactive LED installation where Stark's layered geometric forms filled the space floor to ceiling. A body-tracking camera read each guest's silhouette in real time, embedding them inside the animation — their outline disrupting the pattern, sending ripples and distortions through her shapes. Original sound design, developed in close collaboration with Stark during R&D sessions at our LA studio, made the space feel alive in every direction: proximity-based audio that built in intensity as guests approached, crystal bowls and synthesized tones tuned to the visual's movement.
That distinction — being inside the work rather than in front of it — carried through every surface of the space. Past Stark's die-cut floor vinyls, her artist statement wall, the SEG-wrapped zones, guests arrived at fifteen demo stations where they built their tote design using remixable Stark templates in Adobe Express. The design tool and the artist's hand were the same continuous thing. Her shapes in the LED wall were the same shapes they were now placing on canvas. The exit photo moment — another interactive LED wall, guests posed with finished merch in hand — closed the loop.
We developed the interactive technology alongside Stark, not around her. Those studio sessions in LA weren't asset handoffs. They were the work — the period where the animation logic, the sound environment, and her visual sensibility were developed together into something none of them would have been separately.
We developed the interactive technology alongside Stark, not around her. Those studio sessions in LA weren't asset handoffs. They were the work — the period where the animation logic, the sound environment, and her visual sensibility were developed together into something none of them would have been separately.
The result was a booth that didn't feel like a booth. Jen Stark's world, made interactive, made tactile, made shareable. Adobe Express as the tool that let guests put their own mark on it. Three thousand five hundred custom and pre-printed totes left the convention center. The social documentation did the rest — guests sharing not just the product but the moment of being inside the space, because the space was worth sharing.
What a long-term client relationship makes possible is harder to see in any single project — but it shows up in the work. Each year at MAX builds on real institutional knowledge: what resonated, what the technology can push further, how the experience can deepen. The 2024 edition wasn't a repeat of 2023; it was a more ambitious version of a model we'd already proven. And that continuity — the trust that comes from a client who returns, and the understanding that comes from a team that's been there before — is what creates the conditions to keep raising what's possible.
What a long-term client relationship makes possible is harder to see in any single project — but it shows up in the work. Each year at MAX builds on real institutional knowledge: what resonated, what the technology can push further, how the experience can deepen. The 2024 edition wasn't a repeat of 2023; it was a more ambitious version of a model we'd already proven. And that continuity — the trust that comes from a client who returns, and the understanding that comes from a team that's been there before — is what creates the conditions to keep raising what's possible.
