Adobe joins this year’s Seattle Design Festival for “Create Now Seattle,” a Design Mixer at Adobe Seattle’s campus to engage the design community for an evening of hands-on inspiration, where Adobe pros showcase the latest from Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Express, Firefly, and more. RSVP for the event on August 18, from 5:30-7:30pm to hear from an Adobe Evangelist and standout local creatives as they share real-world tips, workflows, and creative breakthroughs to elevate your craft, plus: a chance to win a free Creative Cloud membership.

Let’s hear from the team to learn more about their engagement with the theme FEEDBACK this year, and how collaboration affects their work:

Q&A with Aimée Heikkila

Aimée Heikkila is the Director of Design for Adobe’s video and audio products. With over 15 years of experience spanning entertainment, mixed reality, and enterprise platforms, she specializes in turning ambitious ideas into real-world impact.

Known for combining strategic vision with creative rigor, Aimée builds high-performance teams rooted in trust, inclusion, and psychological safety. Her superpower is empowering people to stretch beyond perceived limits—unlocking new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

At Adobe, she continues to push the boundaries of what creators can do with technology.

How do you use FEEDBACK in your work?

Communication, collaboration and feedback are at the heart of everything I do at work. Whether it is empowering people to do their best work, reducing conflict, uniting cross functional teams, raising the quality bar or celebrating wins, helping people understand how to work better together is all rooted in being able to provide clear, compassionate feedback. It’s essential for building trust and creating a shared understanding. We can go much further together. And in order to do so efficiently, effectively and have fun doing so, we need to be able to provide actionable, relevant feedback.

What design object or story strongly influenced your interest in design?

I was heavily influenced by animated movies growing up. I loved the stunning visuals and the soundtracks. I learned that wishes can come true and dragons can be defeated, a wonderfully empowering message to hear as a child. I marveled at how they created magic with a series of drawings, similar to the ones I was currently making. It fueled a lifelong passion for storytelling, visual art, animation and visual effects. And now I have the fortunate opportunity to build tools for the creative people making movies such as these.

What is your ultimate goal when it comes to your work? What do you hope to contribute?

My ultimate goal is to build and scale teams that create innovative projects together. I love building a diverse team uniquely poised to solve a challenging problem. And ideally, it’s a problem at the intersection of new technology and art. I enjoy helping people work better together, ensuring organizations are efficient and delivering at quality, and I love seeing it all come together in a meaningful solution.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?

I would choose my superpower. My superpower is empowering people to stretch beyond perceived limits—unlocking new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation. The greatest gift of my career has been seeing so many creative individuals grow and thrive in ways they never thought possible. Seeing dreams come true has brought so much meaning to my life. It’s truly humbling how talented and exceptional the people around me are, and that I’m able to help them on their journey.

Or being able to fly.