Working remotely as a team

Creativity is achieved through teamwork. From the first brainstorming session to the final design, many stakeholders put their heads together. Even pre-social distancing, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone sitting in the same room. Mondi, however, has taken working remotely to a whole new level when joining forces for its Catching Feels integrated marketing campaign: the company, with Group offices in Vienna and London, operates at 100 locations in more than 30 countries. Therefore, it knows a thing or two about working effectively with teams based in different locations. Still, with their agency True residing in the UK, Adobe, as well as six international featured artists on three continents, producing not only a high-quality book reflecting the entire range of Mondi’s PERGRAPHICA® premium papers for creative design, publishing and luxury packaging, but also six videos reflecting each artist’s personal approach on her or his art and their workflows meant covering new ground. To make matters even more challenging, the COVID-19-pandemic then hit. The group of creative minds led by Zoe Truchy, Brand and Product Manager Design Papers, Uncoated Fine Paper at Mondi and head of the Catching Feels project, didn’t accept defeat. On the contrary: creative solutions and smart tools enabled the team to publish a seamless, aesthetic, multi-channel experience with a truly unique visual and tactile centrepiece in less than a year.

Individuality kills teamplay? Think again!

Each chapter of Catching Feels is dedicated to its own theme and has a correspondingly individual aesthetic. Although a total of 16 paper types, two different paper surfaces, four different printing processes, ten paper colours and six grammages are used in a single book, readers should ultimately profit from a consistent, high-quality overall experience reaching from the book’s pages right into the digital world by featuring additional video content. Luckily, the Adobe Creative Cloud applications provided the team with a whole range of powerful tools: “Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, Premiere Pro or After Effects - there is probably no Adobe application that we haven't used. Especially when editing all videos to achieve a consistent colour grading, Premiere Pro came in handy,” recalls Joey Gordon, Senior Designer at True, the London-based creative agency responsible for the project. “Just like the PERGRAPHICA® paper, each application is virtually an expert in its field. But it's only when all the applications work together seamlessly that you get a consistent, inspiring overall experience,” adds Zoe Truchy.

For things to work out even when working remotely, Zoe Truchy's project team made consistent use of the Creative Cloud for teams apps' collaboration tools from the start. “First, we searched Adobe Stock for inspiration and created a sort of mood board to get a feel for the different chapters of the book,” says Joey Gordon. “We collected the corresponding images in a Creative Cloud for teams library that we could access from all Adobe Creative Cloud for teams applications.” However, in addition to the mood board assets, each individual image used in the project was organised neatly in corresponding Creative Cloud Libraries. Since all the assets were saved in the cloud, every team member could access all the files from anywhere at any time.

Regarding review processes, transparency is key - especially when many different parties are involved. Given that annotations can be added directly to the file in question, artists can identify the parts in question at a glance, saving everyone involved precious time.

Working whenever, wherever

Working collaboratively is no longer tied to the office or even a desk, thanks to Adobe Creative Cloud for teams mobile apps. Especially when going for walks, exploring nature or neighborhoods in order to balance sitting at a desk all day, inspiration might be found in the most unexpected moments. With mobile apps, that flash of inspiration can be captured in an instant - and shared directly with the rest of the team if needed. “While the mobile apps don't quite match the performance of the desktop apps yet - there's a difference between working on a 27-inch screen and a small smartphone display - features and performance are impressive,” Joey Gordon tells us. “Before Catching Feels, I barely worked with mobile apps, but the work I've done over the past few months has really won me over.”

The smooth behind-the-scenes workflows definitely contribute to the final result. “The book is the centrepiece of the project, a high-quality print product to hold in your hand,” Zoe Truchy tells us. “However, we wanted to create a whole digilogue cosmos where off-line and online, digital and analogue experiences merge seamlessly. That's why each chapter has a QR code directing readers to background videos about the individual artists, their focus and even the types of paper used. We have long switched fluidly between virtual and analogue space in our everyday lives and we want to capture this experience in our project,” says Truchy.

“Designers and photographers mostly work with digital tools, but ultimately present their results on the analogue medium of paper,” adds Joey Gordon. “With the PERGRAPHICA® Catching Feels book, we want to show that digital image editing and high-end print results are directly related. However, for the result to truly deliver there can’t be any difference between looking at a picture on screen or in print. And that’s exactly what Adobe Creative Cloud applications are doing, in combination with the PERGRAPHICA® papers.”

The project’s success is impressive: significant double digit sales growth is a strong achievement, especially given the challenging conditions of a global pandemic. To Zoe Truchy, however, the attention the project has generated is equally important: 8,000 visits to the Catching Feels landing page with users spending three minutes on average on the page and almost 70% unique users as well as page views each (68% and 67%, respectively) indicate a clear “mission accomplished”. ”For us, Catching Feels was not just about showing the wide range of our PERGRAPHICA® papers. We further wanted to pick up (potential) customers on an emotional level. Especially at a time when digital contacts dominate, the need for haptic experiences is particularly high. We really hit a nerve with our project,” says the project manager. “The reactions on social media services were quite overwhelming.” So, can we expect a second part soon? “Nothing has been decided yet,” says Zoe Truchy. “But we would definitely be up for another cooperation with Adobe Stock.”

With Creative Cloud for teams, brands are, as Mondi has successfully demonstrated, able to launch multi-channel campaigns that truly speak to the heart - even if team members are literally continents apart.

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