The Creative Cloud icon soared high above Golden Gate Park's museum campus for today's launch event at the DeYoung Museum.

Adobe held a launch event today for Creative Suite 6 and the brand-new Creative Cloud. If you're a creative type, you can watch the entire hour-long presentation and demos (it'll be rebroadcast continuously until 4pm Pacific today, and starting tomorrow you can watch it on-demand at tv.adobe.com), but let me just tell you why I'm so hyped about Creative Cloud. 

(In fact, Robin Dick, our art director, and I attended this event together, and when we got back to the office one of the first people we happened to encounter was our friendly IT tech, and we immediately accosted him to explain why we needed Creative Cloud, like, yesterday.) 

First of all, Creative Cloud is software-as-a-service. Instead of shelling out $1,299 to $2,499 for a Creative Suite collection, you pay monthly. It's $49.99 per month for a yearly membership, and if you're already using CS3, CS4, or CS5, your first year is only $29.99 per month. (Month-to-month is $74.99 per month -- good for test drives or if you only need CS6 for a one-time project.) For that you get access to the entire Creative Suite 6 -- that's all 14 CS6 apps, from the heavy hitters like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator, to ones you may have never played with, like Fireworks, SpeedGrade, and Encore. They can all be downloaded to any machine you're working on with the new App Store-like application manager. 

You even get access to two new apps, Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge preview, that aren't available in any boxed version of CS6. These are new tools for design and development of HTML5 content, and their inclusion in Creative Cloud points to Adobe's commitment to pushing out innovations to Cloud users as soon as they are ready. More updates are on the horizon, too.

Creative Cloud also includes 20GB of cloud storage for your Adobe files and projects. The Creative Cloud Connection app works like Dropbox on the Mac, adding a folder in your Finder and syncing its content up to the cloud automatically. You can access your files locally or on a slick web-based interface. But it's got more power than Dropbox, since it recognizes your Adobe files. Dropbox can go, "Hi, I'm Dropbox, here's an InDesign file," but all you can do is download that file and open it in InDesign. If you upload that same InDesign file to your Creative Cloud storage, suddenly you can share it with other users who can preview each page of it right in the Web interface (even if they don't have InDesign), leave comments on it, download a copy, and so on. Photoshop files can show you their color palettes. It's all incredibly cool.

And I feel like a game show host, BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. You also get access to Adobe's touch apps: Photoshop Touch and Adobe Ideas, for starters, and a few more currently Android-only apps that are coming to iPad soon. They let you sketch out ideas, mock up concepts, and then save those files and color palettes right to Creative Cloud, so they'll be waiting for you back at your computer. 

Creative Cloud will even have publishing services, letting you host up to 5 websites, and it'll make it easy to publish your work on iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. You also get access to Adobe Typekit, with more than 700 web fonts you can use in your projects. 

And the cloud wouldn't be the cloud without some social features. Besides being able to collaborate on your projects with coworkers, you'll be able to join communities (think Flickr groups) and share inspiration, work, and tips. You'll be able to access training and support too—there's a lot of new mojo packed into the CS6 apps, but Adobe wants to make sure you stay up to speed. 

Pretty cool, right? Creative Cloud is available for preorder now. We'll have a full review in our August 2012 issue, along with the major CS6 apps. Stay tuned!