In today’s fast-paced world with many people leading hectic lives often involving multiple digital interactions, getting a message across in seconds (or less!) is paramount. The best way to accomplish this is through visual storytelling.
For your visual story to succeed, every graphic element of your website or app must be compelling, top-quality, and FAST – both in terms of delivering the image or video itself as well as its intended message.
Additionally, to meet campaign plans and keep your site dynamic, it’s equally important to achieve efficient collaboration, excellent quality, and quick deliveries at the creation stages. This requirement becomes ever more challenging as the organization’s needs scale, requiring multiple variants of the same assets for different campaigns, social media, and device displays.
That’s why we’ve developed the Cloudinary Creative Cloud Connector for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. With this premium integration, creative teams get the best of what Cloudinary and Adobe have to offer, and without ever leaving the comfort of their favorite Adobe applications, including:
- Ensuring that all creative assets are stored in Cloudinary’s single-source-of-truth DAM system for easy sharing and collaboration.
- Providing powerful built-in DAM capabilities within the Adobe tool interface.
- Enabling designers working on different elements of the same final product to work in parallel for maximum consistency and faster time to market.
- Enabling developers to apply powerful automation and AI features that can automatically generate and deliver resized & cropped, customized and personalized variants of the stored graphic assets in your website or app without any extra efforts from the design team.
Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe CC) is a subscription-based service that enables creative, design, and marketing professionals to create content for print, video, and online distribution using all of Adobe’s leading-edge design tools. It ensures that its users always have access to the latest versions and newest features and emphasizes “easy collaboration from anywhere”.
Cloudinary is a leading media management cloud service that enables its users to easily store, find, collaborate, and deliver optimized, responsive, and personalized media content through a variety of digital asset management, automation, and AI capabilities.
Each service offers complementary functionality required for the overall creative team workflow, while overlapping in their focus on providing always-up-to-date, super-collaborative tools that prioritize productivity and efficiency alongside top quality visual results. A true recipe for success.
The secret sauce is the Cloudinary Media Library, which is available, after installation and login, directly from the Cloudinary menu of Adobe InDesign (or in the Extensions menu of all 3 Adobe applications).
Unlike most Adobe CC connectors, the Cloudinary Media Library is not just another file picker. Cloudinary’s connector brings you essentially all the Cloudinary DAM functionality right into your Adobe application, including asset collections, commenting, tagging (both manual & auto-tagging), permission-based sharing, and sophisticated advanced search functionality, where you can potentially find assets by name, tags, metadata, resolution, orientation, format, prominent colors, photo location and more.
But more importantly, by storing all assets in Cloudinary, from first draft to final approval, you remove the need to pass around copies of assets via Email, Slack or other applications and avoid the risk of different people looking at, or even making decisions based on, different versions. Instead, this single-source-of-truth methodology enables your teams to make the latest version of their assets available to the entire organization with a single click.
We talked earlier about the importance of efficient collaboration, excellent quality, and quick deliveries at the creation stages. A major key to achieving this is ensuring that your Digital Asset Management system is your organization’s absolute and single source of truth for every media asset: no risks of multiple copies floating around; confidence that every design is using the latest version of the new logo or other shared assets, even if they were just redesigned yesterday.
The Cloudinary connector makes this simple.
Suppose your Photoshop designer starts creating a new graphic intended for use in several designs for your new campaign. Even though he’s not quite finished when he goes out for lunch, he uploads his work-in-progress design to Cloudinary.
At the same time, another designer opens an old version of a product logo from Cloudinary in Illustrator, updates it for the new product version, and re-uploads it back to Cloudinary.
And while all that’s going on, a third designer is already starting on a multi-page brochure for the upcoming product launch in InDesign. The brochure designer can access and place the aforementioned Photoshop and Illustrator graphics into her brochure design, knowing that when the other designers finish their work, she simply needs to update the linked assets to get the final result.
Additionally, if one designer has feedback on a graphic created by another designer, they can easily collaborate on it inside the Media Library using the commenting options, without any of the designers needing to leave the Adobe app they are currently using.
When your designers can work in parallel on the same assets, you not only get a more reliable and consistent result, but a much faster time to market.
Watch this video to see how it all works:
If you’ve ever used Cloudinary to deliver an image, you probably know that Cloudinary offers tons of super powerful transformations. These include things like automatic color replacement, automatic cropping, and image and text overlays where things like size, font, and placement can be controlled programmatically. And the best part – these transformations are automatically generated on-the-fly, in milliseconds, when they are delivered in a website or mobile app.
When an organization uses Adobe applications to design their professional graphics and Cloudinary to deliver their final visual assets, they can take advantage of these transformations, so that one or a few graphic designs can be the source for tens or hundreds of delivered assets.
For example, the same single graphic design can be delivered in different sizes for different social media and different web & mobile layouts. It can also be personalized for different users of your site, app, or email campaigns with different colors, texts, or image overlays.
This combination results in everyone doing what they do best – designers are free to put their energies into creative design, while the Cloudinary transformation engine effortlessly (and virtually instantaneously) generates all the required variations of the same image for different purposes upon request.
As you can see, the Cloudinary Creative Cloud Connector was designed with You in mind: you, the project manager; you, the designer; you the website developer delivering the designs; you, the creative team; for all of you.
In short, everyone can work in parallel and collaborate together efficiently towards an excellent final output with quicker time-to-market.
Of-course the examples we’ve given in this blog post are just the tip of the iceberg. With the many options available in the Media Library, Cloudinary’s huge collection of image transformations, and your designers’ skill and creativity, the possibilities of what can be achieved with this integration are truly endless.
Check out all the details in our Adobe Connector documentation.
The Cloudinary Creative Cloud Connector is a premium feature available to Cloudinary DAM customers for an additional cost. Contact customer support or your Cloudinary Customer Success Manager for more information or to purchase Cloudinary Connector licenses.
