Nothing beats being part of a creative community. So, I was really excited to assemble a team and head over to Adobe’s Creative Jam– a half day training event which gave the opportunity to hear from inspirational speakers and put our creative skills to the test using Adobe Creative Cloud.

We started the day with an intro from Anita-Mai Goulding, XD Strategic Development, EMEA at Adobe, and Andrew Hanson, Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Adobe, followed by a speed course in XD from Scott Hemmens, Solutions Consultant at Adobe, who taught us the tricks of the trade: from repeat grid, to overlays, and everything in-between.

The event was partnered with The Princes Trust, so our inspirational speaker for the day was a young ambassador, Anthony, who shared all the good work of The Princes Trust and how the organisation helped guide him through his own entrepreneurial journey and allowed him to create his own company: AJ Media. Anthony recounted the chain of events that lead him to where he is today, and how The Princes Trust helped him start his business.

After the inspirational talk, we were challenged with the following brief.

Our brief: Using Adobe XD, design a mobile app dedicated to The Prince’s Trust Online Platform.

There were ten teams on the day, with the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, Isobar and Sony present. We were given two hours to use Adobe XD to prototype an app for The Princes Trust around the theme ‘Live, Learn and Earn’.

During Anthony’s talk, his appreciation for having a mentor to speak to and bounce ideas off throughout his journey, really resonated with us. This is something that’s not easy to find in any industry, let alone when you’re going solo! This mentor support really gave him the confidence to pave his own way and make the decisions he wouldn’t have otherwise felt comfortable enough to do on his own. Because of this, he wanted to take what he had learnt and invest it in someone else, so he has since hired someone to work for him on a freelance basis, giving them a great chance for industry exposure and the opportunity to build their portfolio.

We thought it would be great to design an app around the idea of networking, finding a mentor/ mentee and showcasing success. After a quick team brainstorm, and sketching out some ideas, it was time to get digital. Working in Adobe XD was a breeze — one of the best features is ‘repeat grid’ you can drag and drop content into an element, for example a collection of images to place as a gallery and it knows to auto fill/place them: mind blown, it’s such a time saver. And it does the same with text too! It has spell check (such a dream!), and the fixed place elements are pretty cool too.

The Adobe Creative Cloud library was another perk of using Adobe XD, allowing our team to share symbols, colours, text fonts and more in one easy click. It was great that we could get our ideas down quickly and share files to merge back into one, before adding the interactions for the final prototype. The preview mode on both Mac and iPhone (via the Adobe XD app) was simple to use and invaluable, making sure we didn’t miss anything out! (Don’t act like you haven’t). Doing all of that and then creating the share link for others to view online, all in one programme, took a lot of effort out of the process as we didn’t need to export to anything.

On reflection, the amount we were able to do in two hours, really does show how effective Adobe XD is. The ability to complete complex tasks seamlessly, within a single piece of software is what made the end to end process for us so simple.

Once the two hours were up, we regrouped with everyone else who attended and had two minutes each to present our prototype to the other teams, explaining the concept and showcasing the execution. There were lots of great ideas on display, the inspirational talk did wonders for all the creative thinkers in the room.

After all of that, we were elated to win first place as voted by the team at Adobe! We came back to the studio with a cool trophy and skills to share and build on with the rest of the creative team! You can check out our winning prototype below!