Adobe’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen officially welcomed 14,000 attendees (as well as thousands more watching live online) to the 2018 Adobe Max conference at the Los Angeles Convention Centre in California, USA.

Shantanu began his keynote address by sharing that one of the pleasures and privileges of his job is meeting creative professionals and students in all parts of the world and how incredibly moving it is to see the passion they pour into their work. He said it fills him with pride to hear about the role Adobe plays helping to bring their ideas to life.

On a visit to India earlier this year, Shantanu reflected on his own schooling experience and how the importance of education was always instilled in him. He said that basic education resources were often limited and, at best, the curriculum stopped with reading, writing and arrhythmic. Shantanu shared that he really believes that students today who don’t have access to educational resources, especially technology and digital literacy skills will be disadvantaged for the rest of their lives. He reflected that it is a passion of his (and everyone at Adobe) to extend beyond the creative professional and to make Adobe’s creative tools more accessible to more people.

Shantanu said that all disciplines of education can be dramatically improved when they move beyond a test bases assessment to include pictures, video, animation and graphics. He said that Adobe Spark was introduced to address that basic need.

He also said that he was thrilled to earlier this year to announce a partnership with the India ministry of skill development to enable more than a million students to have access to Adobe Spark. From his point of view, a million people addressed in India, billions more to go all around the world

It’s that spirit of creativity, bringing ideas to life and telling stories through technology that lives in not just creative professionals but everywhere, photographers, film makers, designers, illustrators and artists.

You can see the recording of Shantanu Narayen’s keynote and the rest of the first day of Adobe Max day via – https://max.adobe.com/

Make sure you check out the amazing new Adobe Premiere Rush multi platform video editing tool now of the Creative Cloud as well as on iOS.

Also check out Project Gemini all in one drawing & painting tool for the iPad  (to be released next year)