Today, we held our Create Now Live event, focusing on all the ways your Creative Cloud membership just got better. We announced updates to many of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications as well as a set of new team, collaboration, and training features within the Creative Cloud. In fact, we announced so much that we thought it would be helpful to have an overview of everything right here.

Photoshop is updating today with more than a dozen additional new features exclusively for Creative Cloud members.  Additionally, the app features HiDPI /Retina display support giving you a crisp interface and more real estate to edit your files. Get all the details here.

Illustrator also features HiDPI /Retina display support, ensuring the UI is as sharp as your work.

Creative Cloud for teams is now available. A team membership includes all of the goodness you get in a Creative Cloud individual membership, plus centralized license management, 100GB of cloud-based storage per user, and access to expert product support.

Adobe Muse has added a set of features designed to make it effortless to create mobile versions of your web site. Learn more about the update here.

Creative Cloud Training will feature over 100 video tutorials from Adobe and leading training partners Kelby Training, video2brain (in Europe) & Attain (in Japan). This content will be available exclusively to full Creative Cloud members and continuous updated with new titles.

We’ll be rolling out this new offering in the next week.

If you were not able to attend these announcements as they happened, you can watch a recording of the event on our Create Now Facebook app.  Other sessions include demos of the new products and features by Adobe evangelists and partners.

Follow @CreativeCloud on Twitter and join the conversation using the hashtag #CreateNow.

We’ve had the privilege of working with the best of the best when it comes to judging entries to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA). Our judging panel for 2012 is no exception!

The ADAA program partnered with Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) to identify design luminaries from all around the globe and invited them to lend their expertise to the ADAA judging panel.

ADAA judges for 2012 include:

• Daniel Biasatti, Design Director, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia
• Gregoire Cliquet, Professor and Department Head of Experimental Applied Researches in interaction Design (READi), L’Ecole de design Nantes Atlantique
• Nancy Juliber, Strategic Creative Media Marketing Executive
• Mikael Kanfi, Partner and Chief Product Officer, Twist Image
• Richard Loveless, President, Global Connections: Art and Technology Consulting Services; Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Susan Metros, Professor of Visual Design, The University of Southern California
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Game Design, Interactive Media, Synesthesia, Q Entertainment
• Ravi Naidoo, Founder and Managing Director, Interactive Africa / Design Indaba
• Hephzibah Pathak, President, Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Mumbai, India
• Fernanda Saboia, Creative Director, Tatil Design
• Tina Shaw, Video Production Manager / Creative Director, NBCUniversal Digital Entertainment and Liquid Filmworks

ADAA 2012 judges’ biographies can be viewed at:  www.adobeawards.com/us/about/judges/.

This summer, our esteemed judges will review thousands of innovative award submissions by students and faculty from higher education institutions around the world. Work will be judged across 13 student media categories and 3 faculty categories, and three finalists and honorable mention recipients will be named in each category. Judges will ultimately select one winner in each category. Winners will be announced at the ADAA Awards Ceremony at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, this October.

Tina Shaw, one of this year’s judges, shared with me how energizing it is for her to join design peers from around the world and be inspired by the work of future creative leaders in traditional and experimental media.  She added, “I take great honor in supporting the students and educators that rise to the challenges of their projects with remarkable/innovative/keen visual solutions.”

The ADAA is accepting entries until 5:00pm Pacific Time on June 22, 2012. Participants may enter each category three times.  Recent student graduates are also eligible if their entry was created after May 1, 2011, and they were a student at that time. Finalists and winners will receive Adobe software and travel to Adobe MAX. In addition, winners in each category will receive $3000US cash. For more information on Adobe Design Achievement Awards and the various categories visit: http://www.adobeawards.com/us/. Stay informed and inspired by fellow designers by connecting to our ADAA Facebook and Twitter channels.

Yesterday Adobe launched the beta of Muse (code name) a new Mac OS and Windows app that promises to let graphic designers create websites as easily as they create layouts for print.  The response has this time been pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good – 120,000 downloads from the Adobe Labs website.  Actually those are astonishing numbers and show that designers really need something like this.   I bet those other Muse guys would like 120,000 downloads in one day!

The app was developed by some of the folks that built InDesign, which has become the standard for page layout and is now leading the charge towards digital publishing.  

We’ve also seen some commentary, in the forums, from the web developer community regarding Muse. Just a reminder folks that Muse was created for graphic designers to enable them to design and publish professional, unique HTML websites without writing code or working within restrictive (ie boring) templates.  It is something that designers have been asking for and will not impact the continued innovation across our other web development tools and technologies.

However we are taking constructive feedback from all constituencies into our product plans, as Muse matures.   So keep it coming designers, developers…

Earlier this month, Adobe announced 28 finalists in the ninth annual Adobe Design
Achievement Awards (ADAA). This premiere competition honors the best student graphic
designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists from accredited higher education institutions worldwide. This year, Adobe received a record-breaking 3300 submissions from students in 37 countries competing in the program.Finalists were selected by a global panel of industry judges based on their originality and effectiveness in communicating project objectives.

Check out the great submissions Adobe received this year here.

Coming up in the near future:
Through a partnership with the International Council of Graphic Design Associations(Icograda), finalists will be invited to attend the Icograda World Design Congress 2009 in Beijing, China where winners will be announced and honored in a ceremony on October 26.