The advantages of the merger of Adobe and Behance
Independent, both Adobe and Behance have become hallmarks within the creative industry; however, their futures were uncertain.
Though corporate goliath Adobe has established itself as an essential presence, straddling nearly every creative industry, in 1998, the company was struggling. Quark nearly bought it, which is now considered something of a relic within most creative circles.
When the Behance network was founded as a way for creative professionals to showcase their talents, there were already several popular alternatives in the marketplace. We interviewed Behance, co-founder and Vice President of Creative Industries at Adobe, Scott Belsky, who shed some light on the networks success and the recent acquisition of the network by Adobe.
Many people have been wondering what impact this revelation will have on the Behance network, so we’re going to look at some of the changes that are already beginning to occur and what we could be seeing in the future.
Free Behance Pro Site
The Behance Pro Site allows you to create highly customised galleries of your work and host them on your web own domain. This allows you to use Behance’s content management system as an easy way of updating your work, and now the Pro Site is available to all paying creative cloud members for free! If you already pay for a Pro Site, don’t worry. You still qualify for this deal. The Adobe and Behance news will mean a free site for all subscriber.
Free Adobe Type-Kit
One of the most significant recent developments in website design has been web-fonts, e.g. the ability to break away from a small handful of standard fonts and font families and utilise an infinitesimally larger library of type, often free of charge. Adobe Type-Kit is not a free service, but you use a selection of quality, well-known types to use on your site for a small charge. Now you can use Adobe Type-Kit for free on your Behance portfolio; however, currently only if you have a Pro Site.
The Cloud
Adobe offers 20GB of storage space to its creative cloud subscribers Behance users will have probably noticed that you can now add work in progress directly from your Adobe Creative Cloud.
What’s next for Adobe and Behance?
We can currently only speculate about future developments, but here are some things that we’d like to see.
It’s clear that the existing updates encourage Behance users to subscribe to Adobe’s creative cloud and existing creative cloud subscribers to display their work on Behance if they’re not doing so already, so we would like to see a more lively and dynamic community across the two networks.
Also, we expect to see greater integration between Adobe’s software and your Behance portfolio.
Increased support for incorporating a greater range of file formats and embedding from a wider range of sites. This is already done quite well by Behance, but there’s always room for improvement!
