Designers are the custodians of a brand’s visual image. Although their work might seem creative and all fun, it is far from the truth.
Without the right tools, a designer’s life is difficult. They have to deal with the challenges of updating, managing, and sharing their assets across multiple folders, drives, or platforms.
They must respond to asset requests and feedback from other teams or clients via emails or chats.
They have to manually edit or create new assets for different projects or audiences using multiple tools.
They must ensure brand compliance and quality standards across all assets and channels.
And they have to juggle all this and much more while working in silos, without the proper tools or infrastructure to support collaboration with other team members.
If you are a designer and if any of this sounds familiar, then you deserve to have a better system for handling your digital assets. What you need is a digital asset management (DAM) system.
But what is a DAM system?
DAM is a software solution that helps you store, organize, access, share, and distribute your digital assets in a centralized and secure way. It simplifies and streamlines your creative workflows and projects by providing you with features and functions that make your life easier as a designer.
In this blog post, you will learn more about how a DAM can make your life easier as a designer.
Why do designers need DAM?
As a designer, your everyday life is going to be filled with hours of creating and tweaking creative assets. You create new designs, edit existing ones, and in the process use images, videos, fonts, templates, and countless other media formats.
However, working with digital assets without DAM can be a nightmare.
- Searching for the right assets or updating them across different locations can take up hours of your time.
- For maintaining version control. It’s easy to lose track of asset versions and create duplicates or errors. For example, you might accidentally overwrite a file or use an outdated asset for a project.
- Communicating with stakeholders who need your assets can be tedious and prone to mistakes. For example, you might send the wrong file or forget to include an attachment.
- Editing or creating new assets for different purposes can require multiple tools or manual methods. For example, you might have to resize an image for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn separately.
- Maintaining brand consistency and quality across all assets and channels can be challenging. You must ensure that you use brand-approved fonts, colors, logos, etc. for each asset.
It is here that a DAM system can lend a helping hand. It can address all these challenges and several other untold ones in an efficient manner.
What superpowers does DAM give to designers?
Imagine if you could manage your digital assets with ease and efficiency. If you could find, edit, and share your assets in seconds. If you could collaborate with your team and clients seamlessly. If you could create consistent and branded assets for any project or audience. If you could optimize and deliver your assets for the best performance and quality. If you could measure and improve the impact of your assets.
That’s what DAM can do for you. It can give you superpowers as a designer. Here are some superpowers you can get from a DAM system.
- Centralized asset storage
It acts as a single source of truth for all your design assets that is always up-to-date and organized. With DAM, you can store all your assets in a cloud-based media library that is accessible from any device or location.
You can categorize, tag, label, and search your assets using metadata and filters. Integrations allow you to sync your assets with your design tools or platforms. This way, you can always find and use the right assets in a matter of seconds. - Version control
With DAM’s version control, you get to see the entire revision history of assets and what kind of changes they have undergone over a period of time. Further, you can also compare different versions of your assets side by side and see what has been added, deleted, or modified. You can also compare previous versions and restore them if needed.
3. A designer-friendly collaboration tool
A collaboration tool that enables you to communicate, comment, review, approve, and assign tasks on your assets within the DAM platform. With DAM, you can work together with other stakeholders on your assets without leaving the DAM platform.
You can communicate via comments, review and approve assets using workflows, assign tasks using roles and permissions, and receive notifications on any updates or actions. You can streamline your feedback loops and reduce errors or misunderstandings.
4. Easy asset transformations
A customization tool that allows you to edit or create new assets using templates, presets, transformations, or integrations within the DAM platform. With DAM, you can easily modify or generate new assets for different projects or audiences within the DAM platform. You can use templates or named transformation presets to create consistent and branded assets in a few clicks.
Examples of transformations include filters, effects, overlays, watermarks, text annotations, etc. You can also use integrations with other tools or software to edit or create assets using your preferred applications.
5. Adherence to brand guidelines
DAM is an excellent brand management tool that ensures you follow brand guidelines and best practices when using or distributing your assets. With DAM, you can ensure that your assets are compliant and consistent with the brand identity and quality standards across all channels and platforms.
6. Automatic size or format conversion
A media transformation tool that makes it easy to repurpose content and transform assets together. With DAM, you can easily repurpose your assets for different purposes or audiences using media transformation features.
It lets you transform your images, videos, audio, or documents into different formats, sizes, qualities, resolutions, etc., depending on your channel or platform. You can also combine different assets together to create new content, such as slideshows, collages, animations, etc.
Clearly, using a DAM system instead of a cloud storage service like Google Drive or your corporate instant messenger like Slack is the right way of creative asset management. DAM can save time and resources, eliminate asset duplication, improve collaboration, and help maintain brand consistency. However, all of this depends on your choice of a good DAM system.
How can ImageKit help designers with DAM?
ImageKit is a powerful, easy-to-use DAM system for video and image uploads, storage, and management. It simplifies and streamlines your media workflows and projects by providing you with unique features and benefits, such as:
Automatic image optimization
ImageKit automatically optimizes images for web performance by applying compression, resizing, cropping, format conversion, etc. based on your preferences and device specifications. You don’t have to create and store multiple size variants for the same image. You can also adjust the quality and optimization level of your images using URL parameters or presets
Real-time image transformation
ImageKit allows you to apply various transformations to your images on-the-fly by using simple URL parameters or presets. Examples of transformations include filters, effects, overlays, watermarks, text annotations, etc. You can also use templates or smart cropping to create consistent and branded images in a few clicks.
Video management
ImageKit enables you to upload, store, transcode, stream, transform, optimize, and deliver videos in various formats and qualities across different devices and platforms. You can also apply transformations to your videos on-the-fly by using URL parameters or presets. Examples of transformations include trimming, cropping, rotating, watermarking, etc. You can also use adaptive bitrate streaming to deliver the best video quality based on the user’s bandwidth and device.
Media library
ImageKit provides you with a user-friendly and intuitive interface to manage your media assets. You can upload, organize, search, view, edit, delete, and share your assets using folders, tags, labels, filters, etc. You can also sync your assets with your existing storage or CMS/DAM using integrations. You can also access your assets from any device or location using a secure URL.
CDN delivery
ImageKit leverages a global content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast and reliable delivery of media assets to the end-users. You can also choose your preferred CDN provider or use your own custom domain. You can also use automatic format conversion to deliver the best image or video format based on the user’s browser or device.
Analytics and insights
ImageKit offers you comprehensive and actionable analytics and insights on your media assets and performance. You can track metrics such as bandwidth, requests, transformations, errors, quality, etc., and optimize your media strategy accordingly. You can also use performance alerts to get notified of any issues or fixes.
ImageKit can help you with its powerful and easy-to-use DAM features for video and image uploads, storage, and management. Using ImageKit, you can save time and resources, enhance collaboration and communication, boost creativity and innovation, maintain brand consistency and quality, and deliver creatives faster and efficiently.
Final Thoughts: Why You Need DAM as a Designer
You know how challenging and frustrating it can be to work with digital assets without DAM. You waste time and resources, lose track of versions, deal with requests and feedback, edit or create assets manually or using multiple tools, and struggle to maintain brand consistency and quality.
DAM can solve these problems and improve your workflows and outcomes. It gives you a single source of truth, a version control system, a collaboration tool, a customization tool, a brand management tool, and a media transformation tool.
If you want to transform your design process with DAM, sign up for a free trial of ImageKit today. It comes with 20GB of free cloud storage to store your creatives.