Venue:  The Miami Beach Conference Center,  Miami Beach,  FL

Adobe MAX is Adobe’s high-energy, annual creativity conference, delivering world-class content, inspiring stories, and hands‑on learning.  It is designed for designers, artists, photographers, videographers, illustrators, marketers, and developers who use Adobe's tools.

This year featured over 200 in‑person sessions, labs, and photo walks.  The conference attracted around 15,200 in-person attendees representing 74 countries, while online participation spanned 204 countries and territories, making it a truly global event.

Below we see illustrations of the various configurations the stage was used for throughout the three days of the event.

Typically this event is held annually in the Los Angeles Convention Center, But in 2024 it was decided that they would move it for one year to Miami Beach. This was a new convention center venue for me to design in and I had to quickly get up to speed on the challenges inherent to the space. The venue itself featured massive 6 foot wide concrete columns many of which have been retrofitted at some point in the leading to atypical spans. Retrofitted HVAC units in the ceiling created an additional load in obstacle for rigging which led us to ground support our entire stage. All these venue obstacles and technical aspects needed to be addressed before we could move forward with an approved design.

Much experimentation and exploration of form took place early on. None of us had designed for this venue before, and so before any stage design could be considered we needed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of using this space in different configurations. This conference it's smaller then summit and so the seating requirements for the keynote were less. In the end we decided we could do a theater style seating arrangement which would give us more vertical height in the hero content screen and avoid the irregular spaced columns. With only two days to load in, everything was pre-rigged.