Adobe announced Thursday that it has acquired Behance, the leading online platform for creatives who want to display and showcase their work. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
With Behance, Adobe is looking at bringing community features to its Creative Cloud platform. Creative Cloud is Adobe's subscription based service for professionals that offers access to desktop software as well as online tools and storage place.
A big part of Adobe's future plans for Creative Cloud are focused on the way that users can interact, collaborate and share with one another. "We always knew community would be an important element of Creative Cloud," Scott Morris, Adobe's senior marketing director for Creative Cloud and Creative Suite, told us. "The more we looked at Behance, the more we realized it made sense to make it part of Adobe."
"Today Creative Cloud is a place where you can access your creative tools and services and with Behance, where you can also publish your portfolio," Morris continued.
Behance has a post on its blog announcing the move to Adobe.
While Adobe is going to integrate Behance into its web tools — and eventually its desktop tools (meaning users can publish to their portfolios directly from Illustrator or InDesign or Dreamweaver) — Behance as we know it isn't going away.
Behance's CEO Scott Belsky is joining Adobe as the Vice President of Community. Moreover, Adobe is keeping Behance's office in Manhattan. The plan, Morris told us, is to treat this acquisition the same way Adobe as treated Typekit.
Since being acquired in 2011, Typekit has continued to operate its own website and offer its own plans that are separate from the Creative Cloud TypeKit integration.
As for Behance, Morris isn't sure if Adobe will continue to offer its ProSite feature as a paid service, if it will be part of Creative Cloud or if it will be made free to all users. The existing free Behance accounts will continue to exist and new sign-ups will still be accepted. On its blog, Adobe clarified that ProSite features will be available to Creative Cloud users. What hasn't been decided for now, Morris told us, is that featureset will be limited to Creative Cloud users moving forward.
For Adobe, this is one more piece in the company's puzzle of assembling a streamlined set of tools for the modern creative professional.
What do you think of Adobe's decision to acquire Behance? Let us know in the comments.