The arboreal designs featured in TASCHEN’s new book aren’t your dad’s Home Depot box variety. Uniquely stunning, all 62 structures in Modern Tree Houses respond to the surrounding environment, whether a tiny, winterized pod for escaping the snow or a split-level playground complete with climbing ropes and nests. Built by architects and amateurs alike, each dwelling is varied in material, layout, purpose, and aesthetic, although all thrive because of their proximity to nature’s beauty.
At Adobe MAX 2025 in Los Angeles, the company dropped an entire creative AI ecosystem that touches every single part of the creative workflow. In our opinion, all these new features aren’t about replacing creators; it’s about empowering them with superpowers they can actually control.
Adobe’s new plan is to put an AI co-pilot in every single app.
For professionals, the game-changer is Firefly Custom Models. Start training one now to create a consistent, on-brand look for all your assets.
For everyday creators, the AI Assistants in Photoshop and Express will drastically speed up your workflow.
The best place to start is the Photoshop AI Assistant (currently in private beta), which offers a powerful glimpse into the future of creative software—a future where you’re less of a button-pusher and more of a creative director.
Adobe MAX Day 2: The Storyteller Is Still King, But AI Is Their New Superpower — from theneuron.ai by Grant Harvey Adobe’s Day 2 keynote showcased a suite of AI-powered creative tools designed to accelerate workflows, but the real message from creators like Mark Rober and James Gunn was clear: technology serves the story, not the other way around.
On the second day of its annual MAX conference, Adobe drove home a message that has been echoing through the creative industry for the past year: AI is not a replacement, but a partner. The keynote stage featured a powerful trio of modern storytellers—YouTube creator Brandon Baum, science educator and viral video wizard Mark Rober, and Hollywood director James Gunn—who each offered a unique perspective on a shared theme: technology is a powerful tool, but human instinct, hard work, and the timeless art of storytelling remain paramount.
From DSC: As Grant mentioned, the demos dealt with ideation, image generation, video generation, audio generation, and editing.
The creative software giant is launching new generative AI tools that make digital voiceovers and custom soundtracks for videos, and adding AI assistants to Express and Photoshop for web that edit entire projects using descriptive prompts. And that’s just the start, because Adobe is planning to eventually bring AI assistants to all of its design apps.
To conceptualize the work, the collective helped to contact and secure permissions from the teachers pictured, and with the exception of the woman in the red floral garment at the bottom of the piece—she’s the artist’s mother and a retired educator—all work in the area. And why teachers? Perry explains:
Day after day, people find purpose. They wake up early, show up with intention, and try to make sense of things—not just for themselves, but also for others. Teachers do this every day. Not for recognition, and rarely for much pay. It’s a repetitive act of maintenance that holds things together. Choosing to shoulder that task, even while standing at the edge of something vast and indifferent, is a quiet act of defiance. Amidst overwhelmingness and uncontrollableness and unanswerableness, teachers—and all custodians of human affairs—keep meaning in the world by steadily and stubbornly tending to it.
Despite modern technological advancements in classroom tools, many educational settings still center around a traditional model where the teacher is the primary source of information and students passively receive content.
Slowly, learning environments are inviting students to actively participate and take ownership of their learning through collaborative projects, inquiry-based experiences, and real-world problem-solving, thereby transforming traditional educational roles and practices.
Here are five AI activities to explore this summer to help you and your students navigate artificial intelligence with an ethical, responsible, and creative approach.
… 1. Use Google’s Quick, Draw! to have fun and get curious about AI. We all have a desire to doodle–even students and adults who say, “I can’t even draw a stick figure!” Bring lots of light-hearted energy into your art room with Google’s Quick Draw! tool. This platform allows you to draw simple prompts, such as a bike, a cat, or a cup, in 20 seconds. While you’re drawing, AI attempts to recognize the subject.
This tool works with any skill level and is a space to draw freely without overthinking. Beyond quick sketching, this activity demonstrates that human input builds machine learning, and it’s only as “smart” as the information (or in this case, drawings) we feed it. It’s a fun way to explore the evolving role of AI in our visual world!
No tech? No problem! Use paper to run the same activity. You can even use the Thumbnail Sketches template in FLEX Curriculum. Students sketch quick prompts in groups and then guess the drawings to spark conversation about how AI “learns.”
If you’re anything like me, the answer is an iPad AND a drawing display. I heavily rely on both my desktop apps and Procreate, so limiting myself to only one device doesn’t cut it for my creative workflow.
However, it all comes down to personal preference and understanding which apps you rely on, whether portability is essential, how vital ergonomics are, and ultimately what you can afford. Once you answer those questions, everything falls into place.
