Adobe just made every other creative AI tool look like a toy

Hey - happy Wednesday.

Quick confession: I deleted half my website this week. Not dramatically, or in a rage. I just looked at it and realized most of the pages existed because I thought a website was supposed to have them, not because anyone was reading them. The "about" page was three paragraphs of nothing. The "services" page described services I stopped offering two years ago. Gone. It felt like cleaning out a wardrobe which can be uncomfortable for ten minutes, then weirdly freeing.

Anyway. Here's what else caught my attention this week.

Adobe Firefly AI Assistant — I didn't expect to be impressed, but here we are

I'll be honest, I've been rolling my eyes at Adobe's AI features for a while. Every update felt like they were taping generative AI onto apps that weren't built for it. Cool demos. Awkward in practice.

Firefly AI Assistant changed my mind, and I'm annoyed about it.

Here's what it does: instead of opening Photoshop for one thing, switching to Illustrator for another, exporting, importing, adjusting - you describe the outcome you want in plain language. "Take this product photo, remove the background, colour-correct it to match this brand palette, resize it for Instagram, LinkedIn, and a website hero, and generate a 5-second clip for Stories." One conversation. It figures out which tools to use and does it.

I tried this with a real client asset last week - not a demo, not a test file. A product shot that needed cleaning up for three platforms. It handled the whole thing in one session. I didn't open a single app manually.

The part that actually matters: everything Firefly generates is trained on licensed content. No legal grey area. If you're doing commercial work and you've been nervous about using AI-generated assets because you're not sure about the licensing… this is the tool that solves that problem. Adobe will literally indemnify enterprise users against copyright claims on Firefly output. That's not a small thing.

It also now supports partner models - Kling 3.0 for video runs inside the ecosystem, so you're not bouncing between six different AI platforms for different output types.

The catch: you need Creative Cloud. If you're already paying for CC, the assistant is included and there's genuinely no reason not to try it. If you're not on CC, this alone probably isn't the reason to subscribe - but it just made the overall value proposition a lot stronger.

Currently in public beta. Available globally inside Adobe Firefly.

Try Firefly AI Assistant →

A colour tool I now keep open permanently. Contrast by Siege Media. You paste in two hex codes and it instantly tells you whether they pass WCAG contrast requirement - for normal text, large text, and UI components. That's it. No signup, no app, no tutorial. I have it pinned in my browser and I check it probably four times a day. If you design anything humans need to read, this will save you from shipping something inaccessible without realising it. Try Contrast →

The portfolio page that made me rethink mine. I stumbled on Paco Coursey's personal site this week (paco.me) and just sat with it for a while. It's barely a portfolio, it’s more like a mood. Minimal to the point of feeling empty, but every element that IS there earns its space. No case studies or process documentation. No "let me walk you through my journey." Just work presented with zero explanation, and somehow it says more than most portfolios with 3,000 words per project. I'm not saying copy it. I'm saying look at it and notice what you feel. See paco.me →

Recraft v3 generates actual vector graphics from text prompts. Not raster images you'd have to trace, real editable SVGs. Describe an icon, an illustration style, a logo concept, and it outputs clean vectors you can open directly in Illustrator or Figma. I tested it with "minimal line icon set for a wellness app" and the output was... surprisingly usable? Not perfect, but a dramatically better starting point than drawing from scratch. Free tier is generous enough to properly evaluate. Try Recraft →

I deleted half my website and nobody noticed

I mentioned this at the top, but I want to dig into it because I think it's relevant to most of you.

I had pages on my site that existed purely because I thought they were supposed to be there. An "about" page that said nothing interesting. A "services" page listing things I hadn't done in years. A "process" page explaining a process I don't actually follow. A resources section with links I hadn't checked since 2024.

I deleted all of them on Monday. It's Friday now. Nobody has emailed me asking where they went. Traffic hasn't changed. The enquiry form still works. The newsletter still sends.

Here's the uncomfortable realization most of the pages on most of our websites exist to make US feel like we have a proper website, not because anyone else needs them. We add pages because other websites have them. We write "about" copy because there's an "about" link in the nav. We create process pages because we saw a designer we admire do it.

But if you deleted everything except your best work, a way to get in touch, and a price, would your website work worse? Or would it actually work better because people could find the three things that matter without wading through the twelve things that don't?

I don't have this fully figured out yet. My site is currently a homepage, a newsletter signup, and a contact link. It feels too bare. But it also feels more honest than what was there before, and that's making me sit with it a bit longer before I add anything back.

If your site has pages nobody visits, maybe they're not lazy visitors. Maybe those pages just don't need to exist.

That's Issue #005. If it was useful, forward it to someone who'd get something from it.

See you next Wednesday.

- Alex