A huge shout out to Sarah Schweiger and the Tampa Bay Adobe User Group for inviting us to their recent meeting.
We were pumped to talk about GoProof and how it improves the creative approval process for Adobe Creative Cloud users and, more importantly, continue our mission to inspire the wider creative community to become more efficient and productive.
You can discover more about the great work the Tampa Bay Adobe User Group does for the Adobe community both locally and nationally on their Facebook page and website.
The presentation started with an introduction to GoProof from Marketing Director Emerson Welch. Check it out.
EMERSON:
So what I wanted to say first is we are Creative Cloud connected. So the first thing to understand is that we are a proofing platform for Adobe Creative Cloud (so we don't work with Creative Suite obviously it’s just the cloud) and we plug into three products which is InDesign, illustrator and Photoshop.
We are currently working on video, and video will be Premiere Pro, which will come through we’re hoping sometime this summer. We're into not quite beta stage but we’re virtually there, so we've got something working now which we’re starting to refine and make better, so that should be starting to become available over the next few weeks.
And then hopefully towards the mid-summer time we’ll have something we can release, with our ultimate deadline being the Adobe MAX show which is in Los Angeles this year in October, mid October.
So it’s a proofing platform, it does work outside of Creative Cloud as well, so if you did want to just be sharing export files like PDFs and PNGs then you can do that and it's a nice and easy way to do that.
But the real value comes as an Adobe CC user, where you can send and share proofs for review directly from within your Creative Cloud extension panel, which is actually inside the app itself.
We’re fully connected to Creative Cloud and it runs from inside Adobe Creative Cloud when you send a proof.
We reckon we save designers probably about an hour a day just on exporting PDFs and sending them off in separate emails to different people. This way, all of a sudden the whole proofing process becomes really disjointed.
Everybody gets their own email with their own copy of the PDF on it. They’re then trying to either reply to that directly in the email body content trying to explain themselves and say what they like, what they don't like, what they would change - or they might be marking up the individual PDF files themselves and then sending that back.
But whichever way you look at it really it creates a problem for the designer, in as much as they have information coming from all different angles, hitting them at different times, with no real synergy across the whole proofing process.
The workflow is just at a jagged spike up and down of different peaks and troughs of people sending things back from that review round.
So what we've done is we’ve rethought that process and we’ve brought it back into Creative Cloud and say OK, let's send directly from there so you don't have to export PDFs all the time and we'll send them up to one shared online platform that's really easy for collaborators to come into - to actually look at the proof together.
It's one shared proof that everybody looks at, so it's condensed and combined everything, increased collaboration and made the whole process much smoother and much easier for people to understand.
And makes it, overall, faster to get something from the initial design stage through to the final approval that everybody's really happy with.
From the collaborator side, you can send to as many different collaborators as you want. That’s totally unlimited.
Collaborators don't pay for any licences and they don't need a copy of Adobe Creative Cloud to look at your work, even though you're sending it directly from Creative Cloud, because they just use the online website GoProof - which sits at GoProof.net - to actually come in securely and take a look, and share, and talk together in that one shared space.
So it's much more efficient, much more professional. The collaboration is just excelled massively and you basically save a ton of time.
And it's a lot easier for a designer to manage the process knowing that it's really just one review round that’s all combined and coming back, saving, like I said, probably on average an hour day, some people even more than that.
And that's just the designer - the collaborators obviously same time as well, because they don't have to mess about with their own PDF markups and then start writing long body content emails with descriptions that they could quite easily just put an annotation on the actual design itself and say ‘Can you move this to here please’ with a big arrow.
