Adobe Acquires Behance: Adds Community Features to Creative Cloud

Adobe recently announced its acquisition of online portfolio site Behance, which it plans to use to power its Creative Cloud community features.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a subscription-based service focused on giving creative professionals access to online tools, software, and storage. But now with this acquisition, Adobe is looking to bring more community features to the service, such as publishing portfolios and interacting with other users.

Though Behance will be integrated into Adobe’s online tools, it will also continue to serve users as its own entity. Its CEO, Scott Belsky, is becoming Adobe’s Vice President of Community, and the rest of the team and its NYC based office will remain intact.

Users of Behance shouldn’t notice much of a difference, at least for now. Current Behance accounts will continue to exist, and new sign-ups will also continue to be accepted, according to a post on Behance’s blog.

For creative professionals, Adobe has offered tools to assist with creating various types of projects for many years. And since businesses and professionals are getting more social in plenty of other areas, it makes sense that the same professionals that use Adobe’s products and services might also be interested in finding an outlet for sharing their work and seeking feedback from others in their field.

At this point, it’s unclear exactly what the community features of the Creative Cloud will look like. But it’s likely that some form of public sharing and communication options will soon join the site, which already offers ways to create, store, and share projects via more private channels.

Adobe did state in a blog post that all Creative Cloud member will soon gain access to the basic Behance capabilities such as portfolio creation and communication features, and paid Creative Cloud members will also gain access to extra capabilities like those offered by Behance ProSite.

Behance was founded in 2006 and currently has about 1 million members. Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched in May and now has over 300,000 paid members, with another million that have signed up for the fermium version.