Sal Giani strongly believes in the importance of constant improvement. In his personal life, this means pushing himself to continue learning, developing and supporting others in their efforts to do the same. In his professional life as corporate marketing manager at Code Corporation, Giani focuses on ways that he can help the brand improve how people worldwide see the company.

“In the digital age, brands only have seconds to capture an audience’s attention and engage them,” says Giani. “Creative visuals and clean designs play a big role in making a strong first impression.”

Code Corporation is a leader in barcode scanning and data capture technologies and its hardware and software solutions are sold through distributors and resellers around the world. With the help of Adobe Creative Cloud for teams, Giani and the rest of the marketing team at Code create sites, manuals and marketing collateral that reshape how customers and partners look at scanning.

Reshaping how Code presents itself to the world

When Giani first joined Code, the company was in the midst of bringing a sister company back into the fold and needed to combine all products and information into one cohesive website. Giani was tasked with helping rebrand Code and capture the company’s culture of innovation, creation and success.

Designers worked extensively with apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign to design the logos, colours, images and other assets involved in the rebrand. Giani and team first focused on developing standards for internal usage, such as letterheads, documents templates and email signatures.

“The response from internal teams was very positive, as people liked having guidelines that they could follow without needing to come up with their standards on their own,” says Giani. “We invited people to give us their suggestions and that open collaboration helped us to solidify the excellent look and feel of our rebrand.”

The clean new brand design has paid off big time for Code, prompting significant year-over-year growth for many website metrics. The bounce rate fell to just 16%, well below the average web traffic bounce rate, while achieving four average page views per session and an average session duration of two minutes.

Finalised versions of brand assets are gathered and shared through Creative Cloud Libraries, providing a single source for the most up to date versions of logos, colours, graphics and other assets for designers. The marketing team expanded those guidelines to create new brand standards for use across customer-facing digital channels, such as social media and web.

Adobe XD allows designers to quickly mockup ideas for the website and share with stakeholders. When working on one customer-facing app, a designer created a working prototype in Adobe XD in less than a week. The interactive elements helped sell the idea to stakeholders in a way that static designs could never accomplish. The Adobe XD prototype also took far less time and effort than coding a functional prototype, which might have taken a team of developers weeks or even months.

“Adobe XD has changed the way that we design for web and mobile apps,” says Giani. “The ability to share and review Adobe XD prototypes online made website reviews much faster and easier. We don’t need to output designs as PDF files and the interactive designs capture the feel of the website more accurately.”

Giani wants to start adding customised experiences for website viewers tailored to existing partners, potential resellers or even end-users. If Code knows that a website visitor is a reseller that specialises in retail scanners, the website could show a customised landing page with visuals and content related to retail use cases. Giani believes that the targeted designs will push website engagement even further by speaking directly to more audiences.

Quickly creating high-quality content

Throughout the rebranding process, Giani and the other six members of the marketing team continued to work on their daily projects, from developing data sheets and 20-page user manuals for new products to writing content shared across the Code blog and social media pages. This is where Giani came to appreciate the speed of Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

Adobe Spark has been a standout app for Giani. The templates and simple operations help the team create professional graphics or video in much less time, without feeling like they’re starting from scratch.

Code designers use Adobe Spark to create banner graphics for posting on partner intranets. These graphics are a key way for Code to advertise and differentiate its products to internal partner teams that sell its solutions. Every partner needs graphics in different sizes and layouts and creating all required variations previously took hours. With Spark, Code can create any number of variations in just 15 minutes.

“Adobe Spark makes graphics and basic video so simple that anyone can use it without sacrificing quality,” says Giani. “It’s ideal for situations such as creating social media graphics. Our content writer can create something that looks fantastic without needing to take up time from our graphic designers. With access to the approved content through shared libraries, we can feel confident that the visuals still stay on brand.”

Creating diverse collateral for virtual times

The speed paid off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Code typically participated in trade shows, conferences and other events throughout the year. During the pandemic, the company shifted to online events. While Giani first thought that the virtual shift would mean less work — less travel and no need to meet print deadlines or design collateral for booths — virtual events turned out to be just as time-consuming for the marketing team.

“Without the face-to-face interactions, we needed to create a wider variety of eye-catching creative assets for virtual events, including short videos, engaging slide decks and downloadable PDF documents for participants to take with them,” says Giani. “We used a lot of Adobe Spark to create a variety of videos and graphics quickly. The online review features in Adobe InDesign also helped us to collaborate on handouts and gain feedback from people working at home or anywhere in the world without leaving the app.”

Working together to improve customer experiences

As Code expands, Giani expects that the marketing team will also grow across the United States and Europe. The collaboration capabilities that benefited the team so much during the pandemic will continue to help the team work together across time zones and continents.

Giani has started working more closely with other teams at Code as well. Code delivers numerous mobile apps to support its hardware and software solutions. These product managers work closely with designers to experiment with new app developments using Adobe XD. During a recent hackathon, teams at Code were invited to brainstorm potential ideas for new mobile apps or features and prototype them using Adobe XD. Instead of taking weeks to code an app from scratch, teams could share an interactive prototype in just days.

“Collaboration is a huge part of how we improve experiences at Code, whether it’s with new app features or personalised web content,” says Giani. “Adobe Creative Cloud for teams is the foundation for innovative designs that help us to maintain our position as leaders in the industry.”

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