I was working in a group where I noticed a ton of barriers were in designers’ way when trying to do good creative work. Much of the time was spent on admin tasks or creating all the multiple versions of the same visual for all different sorts of uses.

I wanted to propose to management a new set of tools I wrote to help automate much of the manual tasks required when producing visuals for clients.

I spent a six-month assignment tracking all my own data and a small group of others as well to understand just how time was being spent and where in the process I could automate it. I want to do solid conceptually sound creative work and that is hard to do when you are worried about just meeting deadlines.

The Proposal: I constructed a narrative to help educate executives who were not familiar with the day-to-day time allocation of their creative workforce. I then used simple bold visuals to make the point clear about what could be done to improve the workflow.

The Solution: I wrote a series of JavaScript programs to run inside both Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator to accomplish common tasks throughout the graphic workflow.

The Deployment: I wanted to ensure a positive experience for those who were technically savvy or not and also visually communicate the complexity of the process so users understood how much more they are doing than they probably realize. The programs were automating exports to existing shared folder locations so it was also important users understand where to find files once the program is done running.

Note: Company logos/naming have been removed at the client’s request.