In marketing and design teams, quality, optimization, and speed are key considerations for repetitive tasks such as choosing images for content such as blog posts or brochures. Selecting, retouching, and optimizing for different screen sizes, are key factors to ensuring a consistent brand experience and delighting your readers.
Each of these individual tasks take a small amount of time. Multiplied by a number of designers or content marketers, and by the number of times each of these people makes a blog post, brochure, web page, or other piece of content per month or year, and you have a serious productivity loss. But if you could optimize each step, what kind of productivity gains could you make?
We are going to look at four specific ways WoodWing helps designers and marketers select the right image and optimize for their content, in as short as timeframe as possible.
Using mason and grid view in our Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution
The thumbnail view is a standard for most DAM solutions. This is important as it normally gives you a clear overview of a number of assets and displays some basic metadata, without crowding your screen. However, it still leaves a relatively large amount of white space, and doesn’t give you a good sense of the dimensions of the image.
WoodWing’s DAM solution enables you to toggle between thumbnail view and mason view. The mason view adjusts whether it is portrait or landscape, giving you a better sense of the image, and minimizes the use of white space to give you a more efficient overview of images.
Grid versus mason view
Hi-res zoom in DAM preview mode
Typically a DAM solution will enable you to preview an image, but what if you want to take a closer look? WoodWing’s DAM solution loads a preview at a max of 1600 pixels, but if you want to zoom in for a closer look, it automatically loads the original resolution as you zoom.
Automated image enhancement
Occasionally retouching images in Adobe Photoshop is not a big drain on time, but multiplying this process across people and content adds up. WoodWing offers an integration with Claro, an enhancement tool for photos that enables you to automatically retouch images without needing to go to Photoshop, or as well as route critical images to Photoshop for side-by-side comparisons and manual tweaking. This can (repeatedly) save valuable minutes while ensuring high quality images.
Elpical Claro in action
Adjusting the focus point for different devices
When you add an image such as a blog post header in a CMS, you generally aim to center the image regardless of the device it is being viewed on. But sometimes images that look good centered on a laptop look cluttered when centered on a mobile.
WoodWing offers the option to manually adjust the focal point of images for different device types. The preset focus point is in the center and in that middle of the selected image. However, if, for example, a page title obscures the focal point on mobile, you can adjust it to ensure the key point of interest is always visible.
For example, below is a header image for a post about Berlin. Without having the option to set a focus point you can only assume how that image would be displayed on mobile. But with a focus point, you can adjust the tower so it does not appear in the middle of the headline.
Ultimately, we have an image that looks great on any device type.
Header optimized for any device
Marginal gains for image selection and quality = productivity gains for your team
WoodWing was built for high-demand content production processes such as for magazine and news publishers. In these types of organizations, speed and quality are key. As omnichannel brands create more content for more channels, it’s time for brands to take a leaf from publishers’ playbooks, and optimize their processes and tools for production gains too.
