Name: Douglas S. Benson
Job: Director of Engineering, Adobe Systems
College: University of Texas at Austin, B.A. in Art*
*which just goes to show you can make a living with an art degree.
Douglas S. Benson is a Director of Product Development at Adobe Systems, leading the engineering team for Adobe Flash Professional. Since 1992, Doug has been responsible at various times for leading FreeHand, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash, as well as Macromedia Studio integration and assorted technologies. He created a cross-product user interface group that standardized user experience among Macromedia products, and has authored or co-authored many patents.
No stranger to the stage, he has been a featured keynote speaker and has spoken at numerous conferences including Flashforward, MAX, Macromedia UCON, Macworld and NAB, as well as teaching master classes at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Doug is passionate about his family, writing, software design and quality, creativity, music and the arts.
In addition to a successful software development career, he’s managed to record and release a totally, nay, wildly unknown sketch comedy record album (Master Martian Broadcast Company’s The Secret Files, 1987), write travelogues and short stories (few of which should ever see the light of day), compose music for several computer games (Gridders, Nanotek), record a few albums worth of electro-acoustic music that will someday be stealable online, write a novel (Califar, 2007) and plan its sequels, have a great marriage and be the father of two terrific boys.
Doug grew tall in Dallas, Texas and now lives in northern California where the summer temperatures are far more pleasant.
