Accelerate creative ideation

Learn how to quickly visualize ideas and explore concepts for business campaigns. Accelerating creative ideation allows organizations to produce high quality content at a rapid pace. There are two parts to this tutorial. First, we’ll create a reusable campaign style and then generate a new on brand campaign using that style. In this scenario, the creative director for a fictitious tech company wants to create a new campaign to promote their partnership and AI technologies. The goal is to accelerate the time it takes to launch a new campaign. So we’ll walk through how to use generative AI to create reusable campaign styles to quickly launch a new campaign. To start, we’re going to use Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly is a web based tool that makes it easier for us to create new styles. I’ll start with a simple prompt from multicolored waves. You can simply select on the prompt and type in what you’re looking for. In this case, I’m looking for a metallic, multicolored wave with a black background and then select generate. This is a good starting point, but isn’t quite what I’m looking for. My creative team has created this really cool style with colored metal that I’d like to create more images based on so we can upload it to Firefly as a style reference. So within Firefly, I’m going to go ahead and upload this image as a reference point. As a quick note, when you upload files, you should have the rights to those images. Files that you upload will be saved as thumbnails. You can also choose how intense you want your style of reference to be. Visual intensity is increasing the visual characteristics within the image strength. Just how strong it should gain influence from the image reference. Once we’re ready, we can now generate new images. Here we can see that our metallic waves look a lot like the style of our image reference. We can then prompt to create new things with this design. For this we want a new spiral sort of style. Here I have the new image that spirals the metallic style. Now, what if I wanted to take this and put it into a different shape? Using structure reference, I can upload an image to use to generate in a specific shape. So for this I have an image of a hand which I want to have in that metallic texture. And then in just a quick second, we can now see the beautiful waves in that metallic style in the shape of our hand. This style looks pretty good. So what I want to do is now share that with others for them to use for the campaign. To do this, I can save the style as a Style Kit. Style Kits are like a presets, saving all of the different settings in Firefly, including any style or structure references. First, I’ll give it a name and then I can specify which settings I want others to be able to change so that I can make sure that people keep the settings that create consistent results. For this, I only want them to be able to change the prompt aspect ratio and the structure reference. And once I save the style kit, I can then share to people specifically or everyone within my organization, or provide a link that anyone with a link can use. I can now share that link with my team so that they have it for use for their campaign in just a few moments. We were able to go from taking an initial idea, bring together images as reference and create new fresh content. Not only that, but we can then make it available for others to create similar content. Now let’s switch gears and have a look at what it’s like for a creative to use the style kit. We’ll see how as a creative you can easily create new imagery for a campaign without having to design manually. In this scenario, you’ll see how you can use Style Kits that were created by the creative director to generate new visuals for a campaign. Here I’m in Adobe Photoshop, working on a banner as a placeholder. I have the metallic style we are using for our campaign. But I want my background imagery to keep the same style but be more relevant to my message, which is about partnership. As a rough idea, what I would really like to do is have this picture of shaking hands. But in that metallic style. So let’s see how we can use Firefly in the style kits made by my creative director. To do this in Firefly web, I can see all of the different style kits that have been shared with me. Style Kits are presets of specific settings for Firefly that are collected into a kit so that you can create new images based on style, references and settings. Here I’m going to use our liquid metal style. On the left you can see that only a certain set of settings are available to me to change in Firefly. This is because the Style Kit only exposes the settings that the creative director made available to me. In this case, they only want me to be able to change the aspect ratio, upload structure references and change the prompt. So I’ll go ahead and upload the image of the handshake. When using images, you should use images that you have the rights to use, even if they are coming from a third party. As will keep a thumbnail of that image reference for auditing and content credentials purposes. I want the image to be metallic multicolor shaking hands and waves. So once I input this in my prompt, I can then select generate. As we can see, both the waves of the metallics dial and the handshake have been blended together. I can then download a copy of that file for me to import into my design in Photoshop. I’m now here back in Photoshop and can import the file. Things are looking pretty good here. Without Firefly, creating this type of imaging may have been limited to what’s available in stock imagery or take hours designing. Instead, in just a few minutes, we were able to create a new campaign style and save a huge amount of time creating new fresh content. Now that we have this design, we need to review it with our marketing team to provide feedback and approval. With the integration of Frame.io coming soon to Photoshop, you can upload your design into Frame.io and this will create a link which you can share with teams to review and approve right within Photoshop. We can create a link which we can share with others to review. Now I’m going to go ahead and switch to the role of the approver directly within a web browser. I can review the Photoshop file Frame.io allows me to review and approve a variety of assets from Photoshop images, videos and PDF files. Each time I upload a Frame.io it versions the file, which allows approvers to review the differences between each version. There has been a change to the headline so we can use our annotation tools to annotate the image and edit a comment directly within the frame and Frame.io can be used with both internal and external users. If you want to allow external reviewers, a person can simply provide their email address to add comments. You can also restrict this ability to only registered users back in Photoshop. I can quickly make the text changes. I can then re upload to frame IO and create a new version back as the approver and Frame.io I can see the updated version as everything looks good. I can then approve the asset and we can move forward. So you can see that style. Kids become an accelerator to create new designs on styles. I was able to generate new images based on that style kit, which gives you guardrails to make sure your content is on brand. It was able to quickly create it with just a prompt and even upload my images to use as structure references. And finally, I was able to use it inside the design tools I use every day, such as Photoshop.