Connecting Creative Professionals in New Locations

My busi­ness tagline–indeed, my entire pro­fes­sion­al philosophy–has always been “Informing, Empowering, and Connecting Creative Professionals.” That last verb, though, has been less active than the oth­ers for a bit.

Over the years, I’ve built, or tak­en over and grown, com­mu­ni­ties for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als in places like Yahoo! Groups, the Ning Network, and sites I built from scratch, such as CreativesAre​.com. I built a job board for cre­atives, DesignJobsLive​.com, which ran from 2006 through 2011 when I sold it. I even cre­at­ed a pop­u­lar brows­er tool­bar that con­nect­ed cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als with news, free tools, and each other.

Yahoo! Groups became a haven for spam­mers and scam­mers. The Ning Network, home to hun­dreds of thou­sands of focused forums and social media com­mu­ni­ties, implod­ed after it put all of its long-free fea­tures behind a tow­er­ing pay wall few want­ed to scale. Even my own inven­tions even­tu­al­ly went away, one way or anoth­er. CreativesAre​.com was grad­u­al­ly can­ni­bal­ized by Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which is fine; the over­lap and even­tu­al demise was expect­ed. The new own­ers of DesignJobsLive​.com changed its name, absorb­ing it into their own multi-faceted mem­ber­ship ser­vices. My brows­er tool­bar went the way of all brows­er tool­bars, which is gen­er­al­ly a good thing.

So, for the past few years, I’ve been miss­ing that Connecting part of Informing, Empowering, and Connecting Creative Professionals even while pro­lif­i­cal­ly writ­ing books and mag­a­zine arti­cles; record­ing dozens of hours of video cours­es; con­sult­ing and train­ing cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, pub­li­ca­tions, and work­flows all over North America, and; edu­cat­ing and assist­ing via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many oth­er loca­tions. Lately, though, I’ve start­ed rebuild­ing some of that Connecting part with­in the cur­rent needs of cre­atives and cur­rent tech­nolo­gies and locales.

I’ve built thriv­ing Facebook Groups with live­ly dis­cus­sion (see below for some of them). And, today, I’m proud to announce that I’m now help­ing to build the com­mu­ni­ty direct­ly on Adobe’s own forums.

Beyond the tech sup­port and tuto­r­i­al func­tions of the Adobe Forums there is a cozy cor­ner named the Forum Lounge. It was new­ly rechris­tened thus by a com­mu­ni­ty of peers, oth­er design­ers and devel­op­ers, and incor­po­rates ele­ments of my design. As the offi­cial unof­fi­cial host of the forum, it’s my job to help it grow, to fos­ter a com­fort­able, peer-discussion atmosphere–to con­nect cre­ative professionals.

My col­leagues and I, Adobe helpers all, will be spark­ing new con­ver­sa­tions every week for the next year (and beyond) in the Forum Lounge. I hope you’ll join in on our dis­cus­sions. I also hope you’ll start your own. The Forum Lounge is for con­nect­ing and dis­cussing any­thing you might talk about with peers at lunch or while wait­ing in line at Adobe MAX or anoth­er con­fer­ence. My goal–and Adobe’s–for the Forum Lounge is that cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als like you and I have a place to sim­ply talk to one anoth­er, to con­nect, to engage in peer sup­port, inspi­ra­tion, and com­mis­er­a­tion, and to find cama­raderie in a pro­fes­sion that so often iso­lates us from one another.

I’m excit­ed to once again be just as active Connecting cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als as I am Informing and Empowering them.

I hope you’ll come by and talk.

Join in the Adobe Forum Lounge here.

Talk InDesign, InCopy, epub­lish­ing, script­ing, and more in the InDesign Facebook Group.

Get help and talk about vec­tor draw­ing in the Adobe Illustrator Facebook Group.

Discuss and get sup­port in EPUB, Fixed-Layout, DPS, and oth­er elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing for­mats in the ePublishing Pros Facebook Group.