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Adobe To Add Behance Online Portfolio Service into Creative Cloud

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/02/13

Adobe Systems has just entered the online design portfolio business with the purchase of privately held Behance. The larger company will make the Behance service a part of its Creative Cloud offering. Behance claims a million members, who use the Web-based community to display and share their work in three million projects. It has both free and paid memberships. Creative Cloud is Adobe's paid membership service that provides access to every Adobe Creative Suite desktop application and allows its users to sync, store, and share content with others.

"When we launched Creative Cloud earlier this year, we committed that we would give members new value on an ongoing basis," said David Wadhwani, Adobe senior vice president and general manager. "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."

According to a Behance blog entry, the Behance team will stay intact and located in New York. "Our team is thrilled to join Adobe and take Behance to the next level," the blog entry states. "We've been given an opportunity to influence creative work, careers, and the creative industry on a grand scale, and we intend to do just that... 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."

The free edition of Behance will be continued, the two companies said. According to an Adobe frequently-asked-questions document, although integration is planned between the two sets of products, Adobe will continue offering the individual services as well.

A number of institutions of higher education are using the Behance service as a gallery for their students' portfolios. Those include the Rhode Island School of Design, School of Visual Arts in New York, and Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.