Adobe Max by Design Subtropic

Who Design Subtropic is and what they asked us to build

When Adobe MAX came to Miami, Adri Tamayo saw a chance to show visitors the city through local eyes. Adri, founder of Design Subtropic and an Adobe ambassador, teamed up with designer Andrea Marquez as Miami Design(ers). Together they came up with the idea and designed every screen: A Guide to Miami, a retro, nineties-flavored city guide where each place to eat, drink, shop or explore lives on an index card in a little box. They had the concept, the designs and the copy. They needed a team to turn it into a working mobile app, with real animations, in time for Adobe to send it to attendees. That's where we came in, under a development SOW with Design Subtropic.

"Te confieso q es un poco muy technico para mi jaja. Entiendo la mitad. Pero esta bien, yo confio en uds"
(English: "I confess it's a bit too technical for me, haha. I understand half of it. But that's fine, I trust you.")
Adri Tamayo, Founder, Design Subtropic

The challenge: cards that feel like paper, on a date that couldn't move

The heart of the design was motion. Cards had to shuffle, open and settle like real index cards, on phones first. We started with animation prototypes, then worked the details with Adri and Andrea until the movement was simple enough to feel natural: at most three moves per card, and a trick to reorder the deck off screen so nobody sees a flash. There was a second, quieter problem. The guide invited attendees to upload photos as they explored the city, and with thousands of registered visitors that meant a form that could scale. We built an upload flow that stores every photo privately in Design Subtropic's own AWS account, sized to stay inside the free tier for an event of this size.

How we built the Guide to Miami in Webflow

We built on staging first and shared every round so the designers could react on their own phones. Andrea and Adri left notes in one shared doc, and we worked through them point by point: bigger logo on load, more room for descriptions, walking distance from the convention center, clickable addresses, prices. The venue list kept growing as the designer community added favorites and sponsors joined, so we kept content in batches and never let a late addition break the build. We connected the domain before the final polish and kept refining in the open.

How the guide was used at Adobe MAX

Adobe sent a welcome email that put the guide front and center for everyone attending MAX, and the print guide in the tote bags carried a QR code pointing to the app. Adri worried about that code: once a guide goes to print, it can't change. So we built a dynamic QR that we could repoint from staging to the final domain. That choice paid off in the last days before the show, when the code suddenly stopped resolving, and we had it working again in time. At booth #855 in the Creative Park, the Miami Design(ers) team met attendees in person. Andrea wrote to us the week the guide went out.

"Por aca felices de ver todo como se ha movido y que a tanta gente le ha gustado. De verdad nos la comimos, gracias por ser parte de esto."
(English: "Over here we're happy to see how much it has moved and how many people have liked it. We really nailed it, thank you for being part of this.")
Andrea Marquez, Designer, Miami Design(ers)

• ~5 weeks from signed SOW to the guide live on guideto.miami
• 10k+ Adobe MAX attendees in the guide's distribution, by email and printed in the welcome tote bags
• 1.5K visitors to the guide in the two weeks around the show

What happened after the show

The designers wanted more than a one-week site. Adri asked us to clean up the guide for an Awwwards submission, so we polished breakpoints, custom scrollbars on desktop, hover effects and fonts until the build was as tidy under the hood as it looked. Guide to Miami received an Awwwards Honorable Mention, and Webflow followed with a featured article and an email mention of the project. Andrea had already summed up the build in one line, at the final review before launch.

"en 12 años de carrera sin duda el mejor development de un proyecto que he tenido."
(English: "In 12 years of my career, without a doubt the best development of a project I've ever had.")
Andrea Marquez, Designer, Miami Design(ers)

Credits

• Concept, design and creative direction: Design Subtropic and Miami Design(ers). Adri Tamayo (Founder, Design Subtropic; Adobe ambassador), Andrea Marquez (Designer)
• Event: Adobe MAX Miami
• Webflow development, animation and AWS photo upload integration: Fri3nds (Franco, Terry, Serggio, Jaime, with marketing support from Maikala and Nico Abraham)
• Services: Webflow development, web animation, custom form integration on AWS, dynamic QR code