Deep Dive in Five with Raymond Lam: Adobe Creative Services at King Library

The above image was created with Adobe Photoshop Generative Expand. It is displayed on King Library’s Adobe Digital Café.

Did you know that San José State students, faculty and staff can access the entire Adobe creative suite free of charge? Not only that, but Spartans can master the fundamentals of the Adobe Creative Cloud with the help of Raymond Lam, ’21 BFA Digital Media Art, Adobe trainer and instructional designer at SJSU’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.

In today’s Deep Dive in Five, Lam shares additional Adobe resources that Spartans can take advantage of at King Library.

Tell me about the Adobe Digital Café. What is it, and how can Spartans engage with it?

Raymond Lam. Photo by Joshua Shiozawa, ’25 Film, Theatre, Dance.

Raymond Lam (RL): San José State University has access to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud library, which features powerful tools like Photoshop and Illustrator as well as generative AI tools like Acrobat AI Assistant and Firefly. Adobe Digital Café is an online place to learn more about these tools and advance digital literacy on campus. The website includes tutorials, schedules of upcoming events and workshops and case studies detailing how Adobe software has been implemented across campus. As part of the SJSU community, you can visit the Café for the latest on all Adobe happenings on campus.

Many of these workshops take place in person at the Digital Humanities Center, a community activation space within the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library. This center represents the shared commitment of Adobe, the San José Public Library and SJSU to enhance digital literacy in the San José community. Faculty, staff, students and local community members are encouraged to explore Adobe software through engaging and creative experiences.

What main message would you like to share with the SJSU community?

RL: The work we do as faculty and staff has a tremendous and meaningful impact for our students. I recently developed and facilitated the SJSU Adobe Elev8 Your Career workshop series in collaboration with the SJSU Career Center and Adobe. Over the course of the semester, I showcased all the different ways students can use Adobe tools to help them enter the professional world, culminating in the SJSU Adobe Immersion Day. 

As SJSU faculty and staff we have the opportunity to connect students with tools, experiences and mentorship, and help them explore new possibilities as well as help them find their voice and creativity as they step into the workforce.

What kinds of Adobe training do you personally offer through SJSU King Library?

RL: I provide workshops, training sessions and one-on-one consultations for the entire SJSU community. These sessions can be conducted in person, online, hybrid or asynchronously. I customize my content to suit the specific needs of each audience. Departments that collaborate with me can expect discussions on how I can align my workshops with faculty course learning outcomes or the objectives of a staff department. Additionally, I serve as a point of contact for participants, offering ongoing support for any questions related to the workshop or Adobe software.

For example, I worked with faculty from the Department of Art and Art History to help implement visual essays into a course’s assignments as an alternative to the traditional essay written using a word processor. By using Adobe Express Webpages, students engage with both images and text, encouraging their creativity and helping them become more digitally literate. 

With the College of Graduate Studies, I worked with various teams in giving them in-depth training on Adobe Acrobat Pro, covering how to create forms, automate repetitive tasks with guided actions and leverage Acrobat Pro’s new AI Assistant feature in day-to-day work. AI Assistant is designed for enterprise and higher education settings, answering questions about uploaded PDFs.

Anyone in the SJSU community is welcome to email me with any questions about Adobe software. Drawing on my years of experience with Adobe tools, I can help guide inquiries in the right direction — whether it’s recommending the best application for a task, sharing tutorials, or offering tips and tricks.

How did you first discover Adobe tools, and what excites you about working with them?

RL: As an SJSU student, I was an avid digital illustrator and loved creating interactive and animated artworks. I would paint digitally in Photoshop, animate in After Effects and use code to embed these artworks in websites with interactivity and sound. These days I’m excited about finding ways the SJSU community can use Adobe software to communicate and share their presence and voice.

For example, I recently helped faculty design a guide for creating “AI-resistant” assignments, or forms of assessment that can’t be generated using AI wholesale. Students need to engage and reflect on their work, making AI more of a tool and less of a crutch. When students engage with AI software and make critical comparisons with the generations and real-life results, they increase their digital literacy. 

Why is it important for Spartans of all majors to understand how to use Adobe tools?

RL: There is a common belief that Adobe software is meant for only designers, artists, photographers, etc. I don’t believe that to be true. I believe Adobe software is a tool for communication. Adobe Creative Cloud has a whole library of software that helps everyone share their stories and advocate for themselves in the real world. 

Students of all majors benefit from using Adobe tools, and more broadly benefit from digital literacy. For example, knowing how to use digital tools like Adobe Portfolio to present an organized and visually well-presented collection of works and accomplishments to a hiring committee reinforces student confidence, credibility and social proof. Social proof means including images of yourself working on projects, collaborating with teams, posing for awards ceremonies, etc., on portfolio websites and social media, creating further “proof” that you have accomplished these goals. When students are interviewed by a hiring committee, they are telling a story about why they are qualified for a job. A digital portfolio can help them visually showcase and validate their achievements.

One great example of our work was the SJSU Adobe Immersion Day, hosted by the library on December 4, 2024. The culmination of a semester-long workshop series, the event featured keynote speakers, an alumni panel of Adobe employees and student presentations on leveraging Adobe Creative Cloud to pursue their passions. Students then toured Adobe’s San José headquarters, engaging in hands-on activities led by Adobe employees.

Niyana Sanders, ‘25 Digital Media Arts, attended the event, and told me that “Adobe Immersion Day showed that [working at] Adobe is not a distant dream, but an achievable reality. The event offered valuable networking opportunities and inspired us to bring our authentic, creative selves to the workforce.”