Bart started by addressing all of you that need to work with designers for your presentations and shared some tips on how to interact with your designer by discussing the most frequent issues, which he called “the stress cycle”: tight deadlines, a lack of adequate briefing, last-minute adjustments, and a lack of a collaborative platform. Then he showed how the Creative Cloud Libraries can help with all of that.

First, be precise about the visual you need from your designer while providing a briefing. The designer must have a clear understanding of what you’re seeking. You are the one with the deadline, and it is a situation where you need to help them to help you.

Second, the lack of one collaborative platform is costly in terms of time and stress. Exchanging Dropbox links regularly, for example, isn’t quite enough. What if anything changes at the last minute? The designer can provide you with a new link, but you must also ensure that everyone sees and can access the updated visual. It costs you extra time and effort for something that could be automatic.

Here Bart showed how easy any design element can be draged and dropped into the Creative Cloud Library, ready to be used on any other device or application.

Bart suggests some things to always ask from your designer:

• Request your icons as vectors so you may scale them up and down as needed without sacrificing quality.
• Expect more from your designer, and don’t detract from the quality of their work by asking them about something that we’ve previously seen a million times.
• Request the photos in their original size. You can always do the cropping in PowerPoint or any other presentation tool you are using.
• Share your branding properly and fully – send the correct version of your logo, all of your colors, and fonts.
• Keep your briefing short and sweet, but don’t be too vague with it.
• Don’t be afraid to invest in stock footage.

And what you can do even more to ease the communication between you and your client, or you and the designer, is to set up a collaborative design system. For example, you can use the Creative Cloud Libraries, which is created as an online repository for design materials. You can then share and use those materials directly in PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Do not be afraid to invest in stock images, templates, or footage.  Adobe Stock brings a wide variety of high-quality images, templates, and mockups that are ready to be used and personalized by a designer quickly. 

For the designers that use Adobe, Bart showed how you can set the mood with the free tool Adobe Color, use beautiful stock images and templates from Adobe Stock, use lovely fonts from Adobe Font’s thirty thousand fonts library.

Adobe Color is a free tool that you can use to create a color scheme or get a color scheme from any image you like. You only have to drag and drop it and it gets the colors for you. The colors can then be directly saved in your library and be used to color customize any template immediately. 

Then easily adjust them with any of the Adobe design tools and share them within the Creative Cloud Library.

You can get a mockup template from Adobe Stock and put your own designs on it to further enhance your presentation’s design and speed up your work easily.

And what’s the best – you can access that design asset library right inside PowerPoint, if you just install the Creative Cloud add-in. All of this lets you collaborate better – it beats email, SharePoint, Dropbox, or WeTransfer because it’s built for designers and can be easily accessed by everyone from your team.

While talking about the compatibility of the Creative Cloud Library, Bart demonstrated how you can easily drag and drop from it directly into PowerPoint, if you get the Creative Cloud add-in for PowerPoint from the Microsoft App Store.