Quality creative work in less time

HAKUHODO i-studio Inc. is a digital creative production company known for supporting client companies through the two pillars of brand creation and customer creation. A part of Hakuhodo D Y group, HAKUHODO i-studio uses excellent expression and cutting-edge technology to produce creative for every type of digital touchpoint.

HAKUHODO i-studio deployed Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise. The company uses Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for its rich design capabilities that help designers create fantastic customer experiences and the UI designs that support those experiences. The company also uses Adobe XD, which allows designers to easily share prototypes.

In addition, by constructing integrations with the Gluegent Gate solution from Gluegent, Inc., HAKUHODO i-studio takes advantage of the single sign-on environment and access restrictions based on IP address in Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise. By centralizing license and user management, and by achieving the secure cloud environment that is essential to creative production work, HAKUHODO i-studio improved efficiency for internal and client workflows and contributed to creating a work environment where the company can provide high-quality creative work in a short period of time.

Fast reviews with Adobe XD prototypes

Working directly with clients often involves cycles of projects that span several months. There was often a limited amount of time that could be used to review plans. According to Mr. Rintaro Matsuyama from the Communication Design Center at HAKUHODO i-studio, the prototyping capability within Adobe XD became an essential tool to handle these jobs.

“With Adobe XD, we can turn designs into prototypes without needing help from engineers,” says Mr. Matsuyama. “Therefore, if we want to review our proposals, we can quickly check how people will react to it. Once, we were working on a rather revolutionary proposal for a client, and people were unsure whether we could pull off such an experience. Using Adobe XD, we constructed a prototype and submitted it to internal reviews from a dozen people in just under a week.”

Designers could hear about specific issues directly from testers, which was very helpful for them to quickly understand what areas they needed to adjust and what experience they ultimately wanted to achieve. A recording of the test environment was also used to share ideas with teams and clients.

Solving problems by working with a team

Mr. Matsuyama works as a planner, and he finds that Adobe XD is also very beneficial for proposal documents.

“When trying to explain a project during a client review, we can look at the proposal in motion rather than just looking at rows of static pages. This leads to a much better response from clients,” says Mr. Matsuyama.

One other benefit is that because Adobe XD is so easy to use, account managers and other account staff can make small edits by themselves. Mr. Tomoya Nonaka of the management administration division, which manages all internal software licenses, agrees that this is a plus, noting that that the number of requests for Adobe XD software from account staff has increased.

“Previously, Adobe solutions were primarily used by creative staff, but recently we have had an increasing number of people from other departments who want to use Adobe XD,” says Mr. Nonaka. “It seems that in the past, account staff would feel slightly guilty about requesting small changes to design data. Now that they no longer need to spend time hunting down a designer to make the change, they are improving work efficiency, which has led to an increase in the number of users.”

Working together through shared design proposals

HAKUHODO i-studio doesn’t just use Adobe XD for client jobs. Adobe XD is also used for developing new business opportunities at the company. Ms. Miho Osaka from the technology division’s advanced technology team used Adobe XD to review screens for the TREK TRACK app, a positional information service for hikers from HAKUHODO i-studio that leverages IoT (http://trektrack.jp).

“Trying to make changes once the app is complete involves a huge amount of labor,” says Ms. Osaka. “Therefore, once we had pretty much decided on a design based on screens created in Adobe Illustrator, we used Adobe XD, which was still in beta version at the time, to construct the framework for the design, add transitions, and share it. We worked on areas where any major misalignment would cause huge problems for us later on. I wanted to share the design with everyone in the team and have them review it before settling on the final design.”

The team was able to check how easy it would be to use the app, and it also received advice from engineers who pointed out that the navigation was a non-standard size, which would have resulted in additional development time. The team was very glad to get this information before using Adobe Photoshop to solidify the design.

When asked about using the beta version of Adobe XD, Ms. Osaka responded, “I might be able to use Adobe XD more on my next project. I’m looking forward to it since the product is evolving fast.”

Security through single sign-on and IP address restrictions

In order to support use of data both inside and outside of the company while still maintaining security, HAKUHODO i-studio integrated Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise with Gluegent Gate, which supports cloud services at HAKUHODO i-studio. Gluegent Gate is a cloud-based single sign-on service that helps users achieve comprehensive IT management, single sign-on access, and secure access controls for multiple cloud services (https://www.gluegent.com/service/gate/).

“People need IDs and passwords to use cloud services,” says Mr. Nonaka. “Different solutions can have different password management policies, which creates a burden on both users and management. Integrating Adobe Creative Cloud with Gluegent Gate allows us to take advantage of the single sign-on option.”

The integration also allowed HAKUHODO i-studio to meet its security policy.

“Our company does not believe that password protections are safe enough. If IDs and passwords were to ever get leaked, all of our data could also be compromised,” says Mr. Nonaka. “By integrating Adobe Creative Cloud with the IP address restrictions in Gluegent Gate, we can configure settings so that design data can only be used from specified locations. We achieve a level of safety that pleases all of our clients using the integration between Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise and Gluegent Gate.”

When HAKUHODO i-studio used traditional software versions of Adobe creative solutions, Adobe products were primarily used just by creative workers. By migrating to Adobe Creative Cloud, anyone can install tools and access necessary data through the cloud, regardless of their position. This is contributing to an increase in users internally as people recognize how Adobe Creative Cloud solutions contribute to a more convenient and more efficient way to work.

All information described here is as of July 2018.

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