Deep Dive

Adobe Brushes

Adobe
Allow creators to capture textures using their phone, and create custom brushes to be used inside Photoshop and Illustrator

A Compliment to Drawing

I worked with Adobe on several mobile app initiatives they had internally, mainly centered around the design of apps for sketching, drawing, and painting on a mobile device with the use of a stylus.

One of them was Brushes, an app I concepted to compliment their drawing experience.

With this app, artists can take a photo of any surface or texture, and create a dynamic brush from it that can be used in Adobe’s tablet-based drawing apps (like Adobe Sketch) as well as desktop tools (like Adobe Photoshop).

Roles:
Product Designer, UX Designer, UI Designer

Location:
Apple App Store

Client:
Adobe, San Francisco

Launched:
2014

Research & Concepting

Initially, I was brought-in to help Adobe create a new drawing app for the iPad. While exploring the drawing app concept, I developed a new app, code-named Brushes, that allows creators to capture objects and textures using their mobile phone camera, and create custom brushes that could be used inside the tablet-based sketching/drawing app, as well as inside Photoshop and Illustrator on the desktop.

I've never created tileable textures so quickly, and it's a lot of fun to make brushes. Seems incredibly useful and well-integrated.
- Apple App Store Review

Design & Prototyping

Being responsible for creating the concept, I pitched it to the team at Adobe, and designed the user experience. As part of the design process, I created a web-based, detailed tap-through prototype that captured every interaction in high-fidelity, providing engineering with what they needed to go into development.

Documentation

A critical part of the process, I generated highly-detailed documentation of every aspect of the application, the behavior of the brushes, settings, social-sharing and more.

Shipped!

Brushes made it to production, and was later combined into a larger app, called Adobe Capture, that is still available today. The functionally can be seen in the app as well as the Libraries palette in Photoshop and other Adobe applications on the desktop.

It was tremendously rewarding to see the Brushes project go from rough idea to production and integration across the Adobe Creative Suite