Designing for New York City, at scale.
The Department of Citywide Administrative Services accelerates creative workflows with Adobe Express and Firefly.
Creative Services at New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS)
Established 1996
Employees 10
New York, New York
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dcas/index.page
4x
faster to complete project tasks
Objectives
Increase speed of campaign asset creation
Increase efficiencies to scale creative output
Reduce production times to allow more time for creative work
Reach more residents and visitors with engaging campaign assets and increase citizen engagement
Results
2x increase in supported project capacity
Creative production reduced from 2 hours to 30 minutes
Empowers New York City residents and visitors to engage more frequently with the projects and campaigns the DCAS Creative Services team designs
Every day, citizens and visitors of New York are bombarded with massive digital ad screens, storefront displays, and bus stop posters — not to mention the endless stream of content on their personal devices. For the Creative Services team at the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), cutting through the noise to reach their audience meant rethinking how they produce campaigns. By adopting Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly, they’ve embraced a more agile, scalable approach to content creation across formats and accelerated their creative process to deliver messages that matter across the city.
Led by Creative Director Stacy Beatty, Jr., and Deputy Director Kalliopi Aronis, the small but mighty team within the citywide DCAS agency designs and produces digital and large-format creative assets for mayoral and all offices within DCAS. Campaign goals can range from increasing citizen engagement and promoting ongoing professional development to driving domestic violence awareness — at a scale of more than 1,000 projects a year. With an audience as disparate as New York City, Beatty and Aronis faced the ongoing challenges of creating personalized creative assets at scale under tight deadlines without sacrificing quality.
“We were stretched thin,” says Aronis. “Projects required countless versions for web, social, posters, and kiosks — each one manually created from scratch. Stakeholders often requested last-minute adjustments, forcing the team to redo work instead of iterating efficiently. We needed a way to produce assets faster without compromising design integrity.”
That’s where Adobe Express supported the team. Designed for speed and scalability, the quick and easy-to-use design platform allows the DCAS Creative Services team to produce high-quality, on-brand creative content quickly while significantly reducing manual workload. The team doubled its output of assets and reduced production time by nearly three quarters.
Adobe Express enables rapid iteration, allowing the team to generate variations faster, streamline stakeholder approvals, and ensure design consistency across all campaign assets. Meanwhile, the generative AI capabilities in Adobe Firefly are transforming their workflow — freeing up creatives from repetitive tasks like resizing and text edits so they can focus on high-value design and ideation.
“Adobe Express gives me a jumping-off point creatively.”
Kalliopi Aronis
Deputy Director, DCAS Creative Services, New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS)
More options, less time
For her 14 years at DCAS Creative Services, Aronis began most projects the same way — staring at a blank page in Adobe Illustrator and manually building every design from scratch. Whether it was a campaign flyer or a citywide awareness initiative, she had just hours — not days — to deliver. The pressure to produce creative assets at scale while managing tight deadlines was relentless.
For its annual Black History Month campaign, for example, Aronis usually searched for color palettes online and experimented manually. With Adobe Express, she generated multiple color options in minutes, including a fresh take on traditional Black History Month colors, and had three polished designs ready for review quickly. The winning concept — one she wouldn’t have initially considered — was completed in under 30 minutes, a fraction of the usual two-hour process.
“Adobe Express gives me a jumping-off point creatively,” Aronis says.
“Some deadlines definitely would be missed without Adobe Express and Firefly,” Beatty adds.
Getting it just right
Creating effective public awareness campaigns requires more than just eye-catching design — it demands thoughtful messaging, strategic placement, and the ability to adapt across multiple formats. That was the challenge when the DCAS Creative Services team was tasked with developing branded assets for the Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. The campaign aimed to raise awareness around stalking and trafficking, with materials designed for social media, LinkNYC kiosks, and print distribution across city agencies, as well as NGOs.
Designing for such a wide variety of public-facing formats came with a unique challenge — striking the right tone.
Using Adobe Firefly, Aronis explored different creative directions — refining her prompts and adjusting elements to avoid imagery that might evoke fear. Through iteration, she landed on a design featuring a train station with people walking underneath — a subtle yet powerful representation of movement and awareness that resonated with stakeholders.
When working on large-scale campaigns, Aronis integrates Adobe Express into her workflow with other Adobe tools. For example, she’ll design a custom template in Adobe Express and further refine it in Illustrator, where she can use the Image Trace feature to turn image files into vector art, allowing resizing without compromising quality.
“I save at least three hours in my process now that I would’ve spent looking for stock images, then sending them for review, then refining, iterating, et cetera,” Aronis says. “When I used Firefly, I just changed the prompt; everyone aligned on the train image that was generated.”
The Gender and Domestic Violence campaign’s success was measured in action. The agency came back to DCAS Creative Services requesting more versions, more formats, and more translations. The original design was updated, resized, and adapted to also include QR codes, making it even more interactive and impactful. With Adobe Express and Firefly, Aronis saved roughly three hours compared to previous workflows.
For Beatty and Aronis, that kind of continued demand is the true measure of success — when creative work not only meets the moment but scales effortlessly across the city, reaching the people who need it most.
“When agencies come back asking for more versions, more adaptations, and more formats, that tells us the campaign is making an impact,” Beatty says. “The campaign showed up on social media, and literally all over the city — 1,500 kiosks, and even broadcast live on 2,136 LinkNYC HD displays at subway stations and heavy-traffic areas that advertise public service announcements.”
Scaling creative workflows across agencies
DCAS’s work extends far beyond a single campaign. The Creative Services team supports a wide range of New York City agencies, each with unique branding and communication needs. The team is constantly balancing large-scale public campaigns with smaller, quick-turn requests.
“For internal events, like wellness initiatives and public relations activations, we’ll use Adobe Firefly to quickly generate background imagery or small design elements,” Beatty says. “For bigger projects, like decorating city buildings for the holidays, we’ll use Firefly to explore ideas — like the time we experimented with AI-generated origami-inspired designs for window displays.”
The Creative Services team chose Adobe Firefly to use across campaigns so that images generated don’t violate others’ IPs and are commercially safe.
“Compliance and security is very important, especially with such a huge public display,” Beatty says. “We don't want anyone trying to sue the agency or the city for plagiarism of any kind. And as a matter of professional integrity, I feel very secure knowing that we aren't stealing from another artist. My team and I take this very seriously. Both of these reasons are why we do not use open-source AI and instead turned to Adobe Firefly, where we know the Adobe Stock library is safe and secure.”
Adobe Express helps reduce back-and-forth design revisions, freeing up time for more impactful projects. “Some agencies don’t want to come back to us for every small text edit or color adjustment,” Beatty says. “With Adobe Express, we will look to create designs where they can update text themselves, which should cut down on requests and let us focus on high-priority creative work.”
Beyond the unexpected praise, the biggest success metric was efficiency. With Adobe Express and Firefly, the team doubled their design output capacity. Tasks that once took close to two hours are now completed in 30 minutes or less — nearly four times faster.
“Some agencies don’t want to come back to us for every small text edit or color adjustment. With Adobe Express, we create designs where they can update text themselves, cutting down on requests and letting us focus on high-priority creative work.”
Stacy Beatty, Jr.
Creative Director, DCAS Creative Services, New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS)
Most importantly, Aronis feels empowered, not replaced, by AI. “It helps me brainstorm, speeds up repetitive tasks, and lets me focus on the bigger picture. It’s like watching my imagination come to life.”
With Adobe Express streamlining asset creation and Adobe Firefly accelerating ideation, the DCAS Creative Services team has lessened endless revision cycles. Instead, they’re focused on creating impactful campaigns that serve New York City — at the speed the city demands.
Learn how to scale creative asset production with Adobe Express. Then, watch demos of how Adobe Firefly inspires creative teams.
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