What’s In Your Toolbox? A Conversation with 4 Designers
7 min read, August 11, 2022
MC D., Trace G., Krissy X., Sergio V., Jane L., Victoria W.
Emily Bernal | Unsplash
When you have a well-rounded team of in-house designers, engineers, writers, and production artists like Beeline does, there’s a wealth of knowledge and skillsets to be shared amongst the group. This quarter we sat down with four of our designers and had a conversation about some of the programs they work with daily and how these tools affect their work. And although each of their roles involves designing in some capacity, they each specialize in a different type of design.
MC is our Retail Creative Director and, in addition to leading creative direction, proactively identifies and troubleshoots tools for her team, encouraging use of the right tool for each situation. She makes sure that her team has access to whatever they need to better understand their creative tools, whether that’s specific training courses or time to practice new skills. Trace is an Associate Design Director and often works with MC. As a right brain thinker, she has a specific creative process involving extensive online research mixed with real-world interaction and custom mood boards for each new project. Krissy is a Senior Digital Designer, so naturally she is involved in a lot of digital work which heavily influences her opinions and preferences. Sergio is a Conceptual Designer, who works closely with engineers to render in-store concepts.
With Beeline’s full range of retail marketing services, our team members need to have a variety of software tools to choose from. Our clients’ unique design needs necessitate a certain level of proficiency in all these tools, and that means there’s no shortage of preferences and opinions among our designers!
The Good, the Bad, and the Underappreciated
Creatively, Trace is a designer who likes to brainstorm without limits, and she prefers tools with a similar flow, preferring to design in more free-flowing apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Using a combination of the two works for Trace because she can make edits on the fly in Photoshop, which then automatically updates to Illustrator or InDesign, so she can immediately review whether a design is working towards her goals or not. Lately, Trace has also been using Dimension to create entire scenes, move items around, and render store environments as a means to communicate new merchandising concepts.
“Unable to find an interesting image to tell the story, I created my own scene in Dimension.”
So when MC introduced InDesign to her team as a means of improving workflow, it was initially a struggle for them to get used to working in this new way. MC’s emphasis on fostering a variety of skills within her team and improving processes for efficiency led her to realize InDesign, an application best suited for publications, could be used for presentation decks we frequently create for client review. Because MC also prefers to design in Illustrator, she knew that using InDesign in this way would allow her and her team to continue designing at 100% in their preferred apps, and then migrate the files to InDesign at a reduced size for efficiency. This process helps prevent items from falling off or getting deleted; in short, it reduced the opportunity for human and mechanical error by designing for the hardware right out of the gate.
Trace confesses that while she prefers Photoshop or Illustrator, InDesign is a very effective program for multi-page projects. Using Master pages allows continuity between similar projects, ensuring quality control across ongoing initiatives and campaigns within store environments. Ultimately, Trace is “very glad to be good with InDesign now” that MC brought it to the team’s attention, as it does help with workflow and deadlines.
Sergio’s work often involves making concepts look as they would appear in the real world, rather than just a simulated computer model, which makes Photoshop and Cinema 4D ideal apps for him. The main program he works with is Cinema 4D, which is a modeling program where he makes ideas come to life visually.
“This Cinema 4D model is of a room divider I want to build for my home.”
One commonly held opinion among our designers is that they do not like PowerPoint! It’s an application that is targeted towards non-designers, as a way to communicate messaging, but it’s not the best choice for communicating aesthetics with any sort of finality. There’s no shortage of animation movements from slide transitions to bouncing letters filling out the bullet points, but MC says these are often overused and obscure the content when not used in a purposeful and sophisticated way. Krissy would even choose Keynote over PowerPoint, as Keynote has similar features to Adobe apps. Control of type is also unfavorable because of the limited number of fonts. Handing off the file can result in the entire presentation re-ragging and messing up the entire deck. The lack of control is the antithesis of InDesign’s workflow, and while Microsoft has made some improvements to PowerPoint, overall it’s not the most user-friendly app.
“As a print director/designer creating for a 3D environment, some of Adobe’s programs have made it easier for me to create compelling dimensional renderings to turn 2D presentations into more immersive experiences.”
For digital, collaborative work, Krissy swears by Figma, a web-based, open-source application. She praises the cooperative nature of the app that makes it easy for team members to communicate by making comments in the file, as well as real-time collaboration features. In Krissy’s work with websites and landing pages, Figma has made it easy to deliver files to developers.
Another tool Krissy likes to use is XD. It is also great for collaborating. It enables a user to create wireframing and quick prototypes and assign editable permissions so that some parties can only view the creative, preventing accidental edits. As a collaborative tool, the XD file allows the web developer to see everything they would need to know, including type, size and style, colors, and more.
“photoshop_blog is one of the pages I follow on Instagram for Photoshop tips and tricks.”
As for underappreciated tools, Krissy would like to pick up Adobe Animate because it’s a tool she can use to create crisper animation and gifs without generating a big file. In fact, her enthusiasm about this tool immediately prompted Trace to download the app during our conversation!
Both Sergio and MC had more universal answers for what they thought were the most underappreciated tools. Sergio’s appreciation of the Command Z function is one that all creative professionals can agree with. “What a life changer for the creative community,” Sergio says. “It allows us to rework as much as we want and with zero ‘material’ cost.” MC’s answer for underappreciated tool is actually just keeping up with current tools in use. Because creative software systems are constantly updating and getting new upgrades or being refreshed, staying on top of these changes can still be beneficial for creatives and present a more accurate ideation, while also being mindful of budgets. Additionally, integrations between each program have improved enormously since the beginning of MC’s creative career, but it’s still not perfectly seamless even within a single ecosystem of applications. For example, when placing an Illustrator layout in InDesign and collecting for output from that InDesign file, it doesn’t automatically collect output of the placed images in the Illustrator file. Ultimately, the goal would be a seamless integration that doesn’t feel like multiple programs are being used.
A variety of skills
Even among our own designers, we can have a difference of opinions and skills, and that variety is what makes our in-house creative team so strong. Collectively, our teams have the soft skills and hard skills it takes to pull off innovative creative solutions for retail and digital purposes, and this was just a small sampling of it.
The tools chosen for projects are often predicated on workflow and what the final deliverable product is meant to be. Our talented team members make sure to put time and effort in mastering the tools of their craft. As Trace puts it, “If you love what you do, you care.”