How digital asset management helps design teams

The biggest pain point for many creative teams is achieving balanced efficiency: meeting deadlines, while producing quality work. Scaling back the time spent laboring over administrative tasks will create more room for creativity—and this is where digital asset management (DAM) can help.

With a DAM tool, you can accelerate the design process by using a centralized place for all digital files and communication channels, so the whole team can work from the same page. That way, everyone can store, find, and share content more easily, and with projects running a little more smoothly.

With the help of digital asset management, creative teams on average boost their efficiency enough to save approximately eight hours per week that are all too often wasted on administrative, repetitive tasks. But best of all, it saves you and your team from any communication frustrations.

Daily design tasks and challenges be like

Daily tasks as a designer working in marketing typically involves receiving design briefs, assigning responsibilities, creating design concepts, managing feedback, and everything inbetween. With so much content being created these days, finalized work needs to be shared with the wider team—or external parties—quickly and consistently.

Designers have to distribute—to name just a few—campaign materials, social media and advertising banners, whitepapers, e-books, event posters, flyers, and all the rest. And those requesting this material may all prefer a different communication method. It's no wonder creative work all too often turns to chaos.

Working in an industry that demands quality content to be churned out thick and fast, it's important to work in a way that cuts out the everyday frustrations of miscommunications and repetitive, manual work.

Assets, assets everywhere

Aligning schedules, keeping everyone in the loop, and sticking to deadlines—they're all dependent upon one key factor: clear communication. Before Bynder, designs were shared over and over again via email, meaning that feedback was not always clear and messages were all too often ignored or miscommunicated, which resulted in a clear waste of time.

Another challenge—which some designers may neglect before it becomes a real headache—is the management of growing asset collections. But, when you're dealing with a lot of digital files and trying to track, say, the latest version of a social banner, an outdated icon that should be archived, or templates for each type of files, it becomes almost impossible without a system to store and maintain all design files.

However, the biggest headache of them all is, arguably, safeguarding brand identity. It’s a critical mission for design teams to keep the brand style consistent across all channels and the power of branding is what can make or break your brand story.

Designers don’t want extra administrative tasks

With the help of digital asset management, creative teams on average boost their efficiency enough to save approximately eight hours per week that are all too often wasted on administrative, repetitive tasks. But best of all, it saves you and your team from any communication frustrations.

Daily design tasks and challenges be like

Daily tasks as a designer working in marketing typically involves receiving design briefs, assigning responsibilities, creating design concepts, managing feedback, and everything inbetween. With so much content being created these days, finalized work needs to be shared with the wider team—or external parties—quickly and consistently.

Designers have to distribute—to name just a few—campaign materials, social media and advertising banners, whitepapers, e-books, event posters, flyers, and all the rest. And those requesting this material may all prefer a different communication method. It's no wonder creative work all too often turns to chaos.

Working in an industry that demands quality content to be churned out thick and fast, it's important to work in a way that cuts out the everyday frustrations of miscommunications and repetitive, manual work.

Assets, assets everywhere

Aligning schedules, keeping everyone in the loop, and sticking to deadlines—they're all dependent upon one key factor: clear communication. Before Bynder, designs were shared over and over again via email, meaning that feedback was not always clear and messages were all too often ignored or miscommunicated, which resulted in a clear waste of time.

Another challenge—which some designers may neglect before it becomes a real headache—is the management of growing asset collections. But, when you're dealing with a lot of digital files and trying to track, say, the latest version of a social banner, an outdated icon that should be archived, or templates for each type of files, it becomes almost impossible without a system to store and maintain all design files.

However, the biggest headache of them all is, arguably, safeguarding brand identity. It’s a critical mission for design teams to keep the brand style consistent across all channels and the power of branding is what can make or break your brand story.

Designers don’t want extra administrative tasks

We have a lot of campaigns at Bynder, and it’s not just marketing using it

Different from most project management tools, Bynder's creative project module (CPM) is fully integrated to help better process and track the life stages of all assets.

All job stages can be preset in admin settings—meaning you can decide how many stages you need for each, and what users are responsible for what. The first stage of all design workflows features required forms so that design teams can collect as much information as possible regarding requests. In the following stages, we can add tasks and assign all the relevant stakeholders—it’s as simple as a to-do list per stage.

First stage of a design project

One core feature of the CPM module is the ability to communicate with all associated stakeholders of a task. For instance, a designer could read the submitted job spec and leave annotations directly within the workflow, as well as tag those whose attention is needed.

For design—and pretty much all creative work—the first draft is hardly the final version. So it's crucial that we gather feedback to push the process forward. Rather than rely on emails that just loop round and round, or desk chats that almost always interrupt you when you're in the middle of a job, CPM solves the problem by allowing direct annotation on assets in workflows.

This is how it looks:

Direct version comparing views with annotations

After a final version is approved, the new design will be automatically added into the asset library and made available for anyone to use immediately.

Never get asked again to change the text in a poster

The Studio module is a shortcutting savior for designers, allowing you to create and edit templates for multiple uses.

The magic of the Studio module lies in its ability to convert InDesign files into branded online templates. That way, all your colleagues can just go ahead and customize and localize editable content in the templates—meaning design only have to dedicate time to the original, and not all its derivatives.

All branded items can be downloaded or directly sent to printing services via the module. With the right integrations, you can also post designs straight to social media.

For business cards, everyone can change the background and personalize their information in the template. Orders will be directly sent to our printing service.

Stick to the rules and conquer the power of branding

Consistency is the fundamental rule of branding. A great brand should always communicate in the same style and tone-of-voice across all channels.

For design, it breaks down into brand colors, logos, fonts, and templates. The most common issue here is that while a company may have brand guidelines, only the design team is sticking to it, which means designers often have to spend time fixing off-brand mistakes. Even if you are lucky enough to have wonderful colleagues who always stick to the rules, it’s still hard to make sure external parties use your logo correctly.

The best solution is to make the guidelines easily accessible, so that everyone is aware of them and able to refer to them at any time.

Because of its importance to your brand identity (and your designer's sanity), Bynder has a whole module dedicated to these guidelines.

See if Bynder is a great fit for your team with a free trial

More than 1.7M brand managers, marketers, and designers use Bynder’s brand portals every day to get their whole team on the same page to produce, review, and approve their marketing collateral. If you want to grow your brand quickly and with quality, click below to start your free trial today.