Adobe Creative Cloud Helps Column Five Take Visual Storytelling To New Heights

Image courtesy of Column Five.

In today’s cluttered digital landscape, it’s hard for companies to send a clear signal amidst all the digital noise. The key to effectively crafting a compelling brand narrative? Great design, and the right tools to bring those stories to life in meaningful ways.

Digital agency Column Five, a member of SoDA: The Digital Society, relies on a combination of Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects to produce clients’ visual stories and narratives.

“We use many Adobe Creative Cloud tools because the feature set is complete enough that we can now exercise using it for the entirety of a project,” Abheeth Salgado, Art Director at Column Five said.

The agency specializes in visual storytelling—from eBooks to infographics to websites—to help clients launch new products and features, or to build awareness.

Adobe XD

“On our interactive side, our design team loves using XD for the ability to set up prototyping and wireframes, and to walk the client through everything click-by-click, collecting real-time, collaborative feedback as we go,” Salgado said.

When it comes to choosing a suite of tools and products to work within, Column Five said a critical deciding factor is performance in terms of speed and overall smoothness of the XD application.

“Adobe XD is so much better than other products we’ve used in the past,” Salgado said. “That, coupled with the all-in-one capabilities with the other tools in Creative Cloud, helps us to deliver the best experiences to our clients.”

In addition to performance gains, the product integrations have been especially beneficial to the Column Five team, making their workflow more efficient by saving designers and other stakeholders time to focus on the creative aspects of their job.

“Previously we had to download, upload, edit, add comments, re-edit, re-upload, etc., which ate up a lot of time and client patience,” he explained. “We save so much time using a completely integrated suite of tools with Adobe.

Wins for clients

Salgado and team recently designed an interactive ROI calculator for customer support company, Zendesk. Prospects and customers could enter a few basic needs for support and then the web app calculated how much the Zendesk omnichannel solution could positively affect a company’s change in customer support – such as giving time back to customers, as well as customer support agents.

“During the project, we had a lot of back and forth, and XD made it easy to create different iterations of the calculator and allow for seamless uploading for review and feedback. The client was able to comment directly within the design which made for a fast and thorough feedback loop,” Salgado said.

Salgado and his team also used XD when creating the interactive Irvine Discovery Park Map, so the city could highlight buildings with open leasing space and all of the amenities available nearby.

Image courtesy of Column Five.

“We were able to build our incredibly realistic looking and functioning prototypes using XD. We used auto animate to simulate zooming in on the map to let people really get a feel for the neighborhood,” Salgado said.

Using XD ensured that every single icon was clickable, and with the components feature, the design team was able to change a single element once, and have it affect everything, making changes quick and efficient.

“Adobe XD and Creative Cloud allow us to create stories for our clients to impact consumers and for consumers to connect with our clients,” Salgado said.