How Remote Design Teams Are Streamlining their Workflow with the CC Libraries + PowerPoint Integration

Mark Heaps is a designer who is a power user of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and he also spends a lot of time designing PowerPoint presentations. His company is exclusively made up of remote workers, and in the past year he made one important change to his process that has resulted in much more streamlined workflows.

The situation: An important stakeholder is reviewing PowerPoint design assets on the day of your big presentation (the only time they could do it), and they’re asking for last-minute changes before your project is revealed to the world. Your team—all supporting your project remotely—is on standby, but you still need to locate new assets individually and then email everyone on an already too-long email string about the changes; all of this, before you even start to have the chance to collaboratively make the requested adjustments to the project. This is going to take a while…

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In fact, that has been the norm for a lot of designers.

Read on to learn how Mark is leveraging the integration between Creative Cloud Libraries and Microsoft PowerPoint to get rid of bottlenecks, especially when it comes to work being done remotely in a time-sensitive environment.

Mark Heaps.

A professional creative’s work is never done

PowerPoint has and continues to play an important role in his workflows and deliverables. Mark has worked in the tech, marketing, and communications industries for many years, holding various creative professional positions. Before he joined his wife as creative executive director at her production services company, he enjoyed a rewarding stint as a director at a design agency whose specialty was corporate presentations.

Fast forward to the present, and the company he and his wife run today puts an emphasis on a small-team culture of remote, stay-at-home workers. “When we started hiring team members for projects, we focused on stay-at-home parents who had been in the industry, but were stuck between being parents and being designers or production people. We love all of our support team; they’re great people. That’s what our studio is about: doing great work without sacrificing a part of who you are,” Mark said.

Though Mark has been working remotely for a long time, his tried-and-tested workflows have taken on a new light in our current reality, with so many teams now working from home.

He’s focused on finding the optimal way for clients to deliver their message. This is based on understanding who their audience is and then activating them. Examples of his projects include:

• Designing training materials for a company for distribution to its employees across the globe.
• Consulting and problem solving to help clients tell their stories effectively in presentations.
• Building out sequences of photos, videos or collages as assets.

Throughout his work, Mark always felt that PowerPoint could be much better integrated with the other tools in his toolbox, especially when working with visual assets.

Friction in asset sharing

To say Mark is familiar with Adobe is an understatement: He’s been using Adobe products for well over two decades. In addition to PowerPoint, products like Photoshop and Illustrator have formed key parts of his toolkit.

“Very quickly, I realized there was a disconnect on how to get visual assets from Adobe programs to PowerPoint. Illustrator was especially challenging!” he said. It’s for this reason that teams at both companies have worked hard to improve integrations; the culmination of this is Creative Cloud Libraries’ recent integration with PowerPoint.

“First, we saw Adobe Stock integrate into all of our programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, and even an add-in for PowerPoint. This was a really helpful step in integrating between the two sides. Now we have the add-in for CC Libraries in PowerPoint.” Mark says this development has opened up the floodgates of what’s possible when it comes to asset management and workflows.

“Now, we can transfer stock images, edited images, illustrator vectors, and more directly to PowerPoint from our Adobe apps. The integration continues to grow, like inking hand letters, then using Adobe’s mobile tool Capture to vectorize the image with our phones, saving it to our CC Library, editing it in Illustrator, and finally transferring it to PowerPoint. All of that happens through Adobe CC Libraries right now. It’s a really great shift for people like us,” Mark said.

There’s nothing more precious than time

No matter what design project you’re working on, completing your work effectively with as little friction as possible is one of the biggest business priorities. Thanks to the integration of Creative Cloud Libraries with PowerPoint, this is easier than ever..

That’s certainly been Mark’s experience.

“To me, the greatest challenge we all face is time. It’s hard to get everything done, and the expectation is to always be quicker and still execute well. Anytime you have a bottleneck in your throughput, it’s going to get backed up and slow down your project. CC Libraries, like what we saw from the integration of Adobe Stock into our programs, removes multiple steps in the process of getting assets, sharing assets, testing assets, and collaborating with others on your team. I’m excited to see what else it can turn into if Microsoft and Adobe work even closer together in the future,” he said.

Be sure to check out our recent coverage of ProKarma, for more on how designers are using the Creative Cloud Libraries and Microsoft Powerpoint integration to streamline workflows and eliminate repetitive tasks.