Firefly Boards – Adobe Incubator

Firefly Boards — Adobe Incubator (2024 - Present)

Years ago, a few of us had an idea to make the creative possibilities of GenAI less intimidating/daunting and more exploratory/inspirational. Less prompt frustration and more visual fun. We sketched, talked, prototyped, tested, iterated, tossed out, and repeated, and all the while, other folks were doing the same.

Realizing our shared goals and passions, we came together to incubate Project Concept, a collaborative AI-first product for the early stages of every creative journey.

We pitched Project Concept to Adobe’s new internal Incubator program and were selected for its first class to develop the product and story. A year later, Project Concept has graduated from the Incubator and is now Firefly Boards!

Now available to everyone, Boards is a modern concepting application with an infinite canvas and multi-creator collaboration that transforms the start of every creative project with unparalleled creative control and direction.

With Firefly Boards, spend less time writing prompts and more time exploring visual directions. Upload, search, or generate to bring content to the canvas, and reference that content to influence your next generations.

Building this zero-to-one product as a founding and lead designer, I’ve had the opportunity to explore all types of new interactions and patterns for generating on a canvas, like our AI Eyedropper, Remix, and Generative Fill and Expand. It’s been a lot of fun pushing every angle of the core app experience to be more fluid, natural, and intuitive.

And as the first product at Adobe to feature models from partners like Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, and Google, we’ve played a big part in the company’s larger AI strategy. Directly within Boards, users can generate not only with Firefly models but also with FLUX.1 Kontext, GPT Image, Veo 3, and more.

One of the most rewarding things about having worked on Firefly since the beginning has to be seeing how far generative AI has come in the past few years. Boards is the product I’ve dreamed of for a long time: rapid ideation where generation is the core but not the only way to work. It’s a tool for taking the concept in your head and rendering it by encouraging you to consecutively ask “what if?” with the rest of your team.

Artists and creators across industries are using Firefly Boards to do just that, breathing life into their early concepts. Visualizing ideas on the shared canvas helps them align with their collaborators on taste, vibes, and feel—all the things that are hard to capture with words alone.

Firefly Boards is currently in beta, and we’re building, polishing, and improving the product every day. It’s available to everyone, so try it out and let me know what you think!

Among many others, some major contributors to the original Project Concept include Ajinkya Kale, Ross McKegney, Ash Huang, Joe Reisinger, Danielle Morimoto, Evan Shimizu, and CJ Gammon.