Ease Access to Graphics

by Penny Lunt

For any company that wants to maintain a strong brand image, consistent, high-quality graphics are critical — for Web sites, brochures, advertisements, product packaging, magazine and newspaper articles and retail displays.

Yet recreating graphics for different forms of delivery can be cumbersome and time consuming, especially when assets change frequently, are needed in different formats and sizes, and promotional elements are added or removed on a regular basis.

Enter Adobe AlterCast, image server software that automates the process of creating and repurposing images for delivery to intranets, extranets and the Web. With its browser interface and Web services features, AlterCast can potentially provide business users throughout the enterprise and beyond with self-service access to graphic assets.

No company knows the need for slick imagery better than Salomon North America, the Portland, OR, maker of snowboards, skis, inline skates and athletic apparel. The February Olympic competition in Salt Lake City showed the world that, in snowboarding and skiing, style — in both moves and appearance — is just as important as technical skill.

"Snowboard imagery is very, very highly 'concepted,'" says Kevin Peoples, Salomon's e-business manager. "Very specific images are chosen. We might use the same ones at the Olympics, in a trade magazine and at a trade show, with slight modifications such as adding or removing award marks and corporate logos."

Salomon's graphic designers were constantly regenerating and modifying product shots, action shots and athlete photos to satisfy internal marketing and public relations needs, while also satisfying requests from sporting goods dealers needing graphics for ads, point-of-purchase displays and Web sites. At times it was overwhelming. Salomon gets 20 to 40 requests per day from the media alone, and each time, a designer had to find the source CDs, use Photoshop to create and apply layers to the image and resave the file in the requested size and format.

In early 2002, Salomon integrated AlterCast with an Exogen content management system from NetXposure, another company based in Portland. The result is a system that has eased the burden at Solomon while providing better service and support for important media and retail partners. So far, about 6,000 images have been stored in the system.

"One great benefit of AlterCast is that we store only one version of every image," Peoples says. "We don't have EPSs, TIFFs, JPEGs and PSDs of every product shot. We keep one PSD [Photoshop file] version. Using AlterCast, we can quickly locate an image, request a given size, compression level and file format, and we're done."

The AlterCast imaging server lets users reformat and resize images and replace text and graphics on images stored in a content or digital asset database. It's not designed to compete with digital asset management and content management software; it complements them. In fact, Adobe is developing partnerships with content management software vendors Documentum and Interwoven. Adobe also provides toolkits for integrating AlterCast with COM, Perl and Java programs. AlterCast Web services will let people access images from remote sites. Priced at $7,500 to $60,000, depending on the number of CPUs, AlterCast is tightly integrated with Adobe's popular Illustrator and Photoshop applications.

Working from the AlterCast server, users can call up PSD, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WBMP, TIFF and SVG files and change the resolution or color mode (for example, CMYK to RGB). They can change the file size and type for delivery to a print medium, the Web or a wireless device. Users can create templates in Illustrator or Photoshop that contain optional elements that can be applied to a graphic, such as a text banner, a logo or a circle containing the text "25% Off."

At Salomon, "the designers know where they want the logo to be, where they want an award mark to go, and where they want specific imagery to go," Peoples says. Once the template defining what can go where is locked down, product managers can go into AlterCast and apply the elements they need. A product manager putting together a magazine ad, for example, might want to change the "25% Off" icon to "30% Off." Options include adding a text banner, adding a logo, resizing, optimizing and choosing an output format.

Once a product group has turned a collection of images into advertisements using the templates, AlterCast supports a collaborative process that was impossible before at Salomon: People in other departments can preview the ads in their browsers. An employee responsible for trade show exhibit materials, for example, could decide which corporate logos will appear on a particular magazine ad. Eventually, outside retailers and members of the press may be given access to AlterCast as well so they can obtain Salomon graphics in a self-service mode. Only authorized people would be given password access into the system.

"Instead of us relying on phone calls and emails to get the right format of an image to [people], they could download the formats they want for themselves," Peoples says.

Salomon uses AlterCast to ease the transition of publishing print catalogs to the Web. A typical catalog contains 300 images. It used to take one full day for graphics professionals to pull the necessary high-resolution CMYK, TIFF and EPS files off CDs, organize them on a drive and process them in batches, in a chaotic, uncentralized way. Using AlterCast, Peoples says an entire product catalog can be quickly converted and posted to an extranet or Web site within a few minutes.

The software also helps Salomon enforce consistent brand imagery. "Let's say the graphic changes for a snowboard," Peoples says. "By updating the one version in AlterCast, it's clear what happened with the image and when it changed."

AlterCast plays a unique role in content/digital asset management. "This won't replace the content management system you roll out to the average content contributors in marketing and public relations," points out Harley Manning, research director at Forrester, Cambridge, MA. "It's targeted at facilitating collaboration among professionals in Adobe's traditional area of strength: design pros."

So while Adobe AlterCast may not stand the world of content/digital asset management on its head, it could help companies automate the time-consuming processes of repurposing graphics, maintaining image and brand consistency, updating Web sites and extending creative collaboration beyond the boundaries of the graphics department.