Adobe announced today that it has acquired social media platform Behance, which will become part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
Adobe SVP and GM David Wadhwani says, “When we launched Creative Cloud earlier this year, we committed that we would give members new value on an ongoing basis. Last week, we launched new training features, file synchronization and sharing capabilities, digital publishing services and significant updates to a number of our tools, including Photoshop. Behance will play a key role in Adobe’s efforts to serve the creative world in the years to come and will accelerate our efforts to enable a more open and collaborative creative community.”
Behance co-founder and CEO Scott Belsky adds, “We set out to connect the creative world and maximize the exposure that creatives receive for their work. As creatives rely more on the social Web for collaboration and opportunity, creative people and teams will benefit from Behance’s community features integrated into the creative process. We’re thrilled to join Adobe and empower creative careers on a global scale.”
The Benhance team goes on on its own blog, saying:
Our mission continues: we want to empower creative people and teams to make ideas happen. We believe that a free and open platform to showcase work – and get discovered – will serve creative careers in extraordinary ways. Not only will we leverage Adobe’s resources to further build Behance, but we have been tasked with the responsibility to influence and improve Adobe’s services for the creative community – making them more collaborative and in sync with the future of creative workflow.
In practical terms, our team will continue to implement our (very ambitious) roadmap for Behance and integrate Behance features into Adobe’s services. We are eager to translate the site into multiple languages and leverage the latest technology to display creative work. 99U, our annual conference, and all of our efforts to educate and organize the creative community will continue to grow. And finally, we will explore new opportunities to move the creative industry forward, through better discovery applications, more transparency in the creative process, and providing access to the data behind the creative world at work.
According to Adobe, portfolios on Behance-powered sites have received over 90 million views. There are over 3 million projects hosted on the platform.