Adobe is trying to make Creative Cloud’s website into more of a hub for collaborating across teams. So today, it’s announcing a few new tools headed to the platform: basic web-based versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, a new feature called Canvas that lets you make mood boards, and a feature called Spaces that lets teams arrange and synchronize assets for projects.
Canvas is similar to a bunch of tools that designers already use — there’s Miro, PureRef, you could even do something like this in Figma if you wanted to — but it comes with the perk of being integrated with Adobe’s ecosystem. You can pull Cloud documents onto a canvas, and they’ll link back to the original file, letting you open them up to make changes.
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It also ties into Spaces, which is Adobe’s new interface for organizing files across teams. Creative Cloud’s website already serves as sort of a bare-bones take on Google Drive but for all your cloud PSDs and whatnot. Now, Adobe’s adding a way to group your stuff by teams and by projects, synchronized for everyone involved. Spaces can include Canvas files, asset libraries, and cloud files. For teams that are primarily using Adobe apps, it’s now even easier to never leave them.
Canvas and Spaces won’t be available right away. Adobe plans to roll them out to everyone next year, but for now, they’re available in a limited beta.
The updates play into two of Adobe’s broader goals: making it easier to collaborate and owning the entire software chain so that no one ever has to leave Adobe’s apps. Adobe recently completed its acquisition of Frame.io, a popular web-based video collaboration tool; while it doesn’t have news to share about that service yet, you can imagine that playing a big role in this mission, too.
