Collaborate visually with MURAL and Creative Cloud libraries

With Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries in MURAL, you & your team can easily stay up-to-date & on-brand, using your creative assets for visual collaboration.

We have all been there — you are on a tight deadline, but your finished design is sitting in your stakeholder’s inbox. They will get to it, but not before hours or even days of productivity are lost, and this is just the first iteration. Meanwhile, for your stakeholder, the challenge of viewing, understanding, and commenting on your very visual work is a challenge. This is going to take a while, they think to themselves.

Shortening feedback loops come with many advantages, such as faster innovation, more room for creative iteration, and ultimately superior results. But in marketing and product design, shortening the time it takes to give and gather feedback is no easy task. There is a fundamental gap between a designer’s process and how business stakeholders interact with their designs. Simply put, as a creative, you work visually in design tools, while your stakeholders generally provide feedback in words, either verbally or in writing. This mismatch in how you communicate slows down creative collaboration.

When stakeholders cannot work visually alongside the designer, briefing and feedback processes can be rife with unnecessary delays and misunderstandings. This is especially true with so many of us working remotely — there is no popping by someone’s desk to clarify what they meant or making sure they understand your design. It is now time to open the doors and empower everyone to collaborate visually.

Visual collaboration leads to more innovative design in less time

At its core, visual collaboration allows people to work together — either in real-time or asynchronously — in a shared space where teams can express ideas visually. In days past, many of us turned to a conference room whiteboard to communicate in words, drawings, charts, and diagrams. But even then, you needed your team and stakeholders in the same room, and the whiteboard had to be transcribed into a digital format.

That is why creative and business teams turn to solutions like MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. MURAL’s visual thinking canvas transforms old ways of working into a digital environment where you and your business stakeholders can collaborate visually. Now everyone can be heard equally — ideas come to life through drawings, diagrams, sticky notes, pre-made templates, and tools for facilitation. MURAL makes collaboration with your team more interactive, productive, and genuinely fun.

Through MURAL’s integration with Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, designers can instantly add visual assets created in Adobe Creative Cloud apps to a mural — allowing everyone to work together with those assets visually. This new integration can play an important role in shortening the feedback loop for the design process. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Gather design requirements and brainstorm ideas visually

Instead of gathering requirements the traditional way, you can have business stakeholders brainstorm, ideate, and define requirements using intuitive visual tools in MURAL. With the new integration, you will have instant access to your Creative Cloud Libraries right in MURAL. Add graphics, images, logos, icons, and more to the shared canvas so everyone — even non-designers — can use these creative elements to see what does (and does not) work together in certain contexts.

By looping stakeholders in early, and allowing them to play and experiment with early designs in a mural, you will be able to get much better feedback, address sticking points early in the process and ensure that everyone is aligned on the vision and objectives of the project.

Suppose you are on a team working on a social media campaign. If you are the marketer, you can quickly access and pull in the approved social media assets the design team has created to present to the broader team for feedback, or experiment and create examples of how they envision the campaign, even drafting copy along the way using branded templates.

Run effective asynchronous design reviews

MURAL allows you to perform asynchronous design check-ins, which can be an essential tool for getting quick feedback from a distributed team (more important now than ever). Sharing a mural set up to facilitate clear feedback can save everyone time — especially if key reviewers already have back-to-back meetings on their calendars.

With the MURAL integration, a designer can simply drag and drop the creative asset into a mural from the sidebar. Regardless of the original file type, it will immediately show up as a PNG image in the mural. Sharing the mural with key stakeholders is as easy as clicking a button, and they can then jump in to provide feedback without needing a MURAL membership.

When reviewing designs in a mural, stakeholders can use sticky notes, text boxes, arrows, drawings, and more to provide feedback. The result is more clarity than you would get by email. At MURAL, for example, teams often use color-coding on sticky notes during design critiques to follow rose-bud-thorn, a popular design thinking technique that is usually done with stickies on a physical whiteboard. It is great for identifying things as positive, negative, or having potential.

Connect Creative Cloud Libraries with MURAL to keep creative elements at your fingertips

By accessing Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries in MURAL, you and your team can easily stay up-to-date and on-brand, using your creative elements for visual collaboration. Connect the integration simply by logging into your Creative Cloud account inside of MURAL with your Adobe ID. If you do not have one, you can get a free Adobe account from here.

MURAL includes the integration with Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries in all of their plans. If you already have MURAL, click on the images icon in the sidebar, and look for the Creative Cloud tab, and log in to your Adobe account. If not, MURAL does let you give it a try for free. Either way, with over 200 templates to jump-start your next collaboration session, it is easy to get started.