Daniel Jester

Daniel Jester

Creative Force Chief Evangelist

Daniel Jester is an experienced creative production professional who has managed production teams, built and launched new studios, and produced large-scale projects. He’s worked in-house at brands like Amazon, Nordstrom, and Farfetch as well as commercial studios like CONVYR. Creative-minded, while able to effectively plan for and manage a complex project, he bridges the gap between spreadsheets and creative talent.

Course Audience

This course is for those who will serve as the administrators of their studio's Creative Force account. As an admin, you’ll be responsible for working with members of the Creative Force team to get your account configured to the needs of your studio as well as integrating Creative Force into your creative operations. You will also have full access permissions in your Creative Force account, making you the primary contact point within your studio to update style guides, workflows, personnel information, locations, or make any other changes to your account.

Description

At the inception of Creative Force, our founding team wanted to identify how photo studios operated and what aspects of the creative process could be improved. To do that, they walked through high-volume e-commerce photo studios around the world and spoke to both their leadership and management teams as well as to the creatives working on the floor.

What they found was frustration at every step of the creative production process. And the source of all that frustration was obvious. Even the most successful studios were using spreadsheets, PDFs, and binders full of printouts to run their studio operations. Unsurprisingly, this approach to operations caused a ton of inefficiencies in the creative process, including, but not limited to:

  • Creatives working off of outdated style guides
  • Samples being lost they moved around the studio or samples not being on set when they needed to be
  • Challenges around clear and efficient communication between different creative teams around art direction
  • Work being done multiple times or not being done due to a lack of visibility around who should be doing what work AND what the current status for what different process work was at
  • A series of different digital tools duct-taped together to create makeshift end-to-end workflow solutions that often didn’t work the way they needed to
  • A lack of data and insights around studio operations including the ability to identify bottlenecks, manage workloads, and manage sample availability
  • Too many manual processes (like file naming) are prone to error when done in a high-pace environment like a studio

We could go on. Suffice to say, it was clear photo studios around the world needed an entirely new way of working.

As a Creative Force Admin, you’ll be one of the primary drivers bringing that new way of working to your studio.

That process requires taking your current, physical creative operations and translating them into a digital version inside Creative Force. This is actually a healthy exercise because it forces you and your teams to ask fundamental questions about your ways of working and why you do the things you do.

This course will walk you through part of that process. As you advance through the course, you will simultaneously be building out your Creative Force account. As part of this course, you’ll be required to do the following:

  • Complete a technical requirements check to ensure that your technical environment will support Creative Force
  • Configure your general settings including migration of color references, import product status, and custom production types
  • Understand critical Creative Force concepts including Jobs, Products, and Samples
  • Provide the Product data that you would like to associate with each of the Products you upload to Creative Force
  • Provide the Sample data that you would like to associate with each of the Samples you upload to Creative Force
  • Provide the jobs data that you would like to associate with each of the Jobs you upload to Creative Force
  • Create your required clients in Creative Force to keep any sensitive data that can’t be shared between clients separated
  • Configure any of the presets and variants you might require in your creative process
  • Configure your asset delivery so Creative Force knows where to deliver your assets when they're finished
  • Set up an external post-production vendor so images can automatically be sent to them and then back to your Creative Force account
  • Create all of your users, user roles, and user groups
  • Set up the different locations you’ll be using to check samples in and out of
  • Configure your barcode labels to stick on samples to scan them in and out of Creative Force
  • Configure sample pooling if you want samples to be shared between products
  • Configure your different workflows so that different production types follow different paths through your creative production process
  • Configure your style guides so that everyone at every step of the creative process is aware of the art direction required for each product

At the end of the course, you’ll have a Creative Force account ready to revolutionize how your studio operates. And on top of that, you’ll have a shiny new Creative Force for Admins certificate you can share on LinkedIn to let the world know you are a certified Creative Force Admin and a master of “Flow Production.”

About this course

  • $195.00
  • 244 lessons
  • 35 minutes of video
  • 6 hour completion time
  • Creative Force Admins Certificate

Interested in this course? Email us at [email protected]

Upon completing this course, you will receive a certificate of completion you can share on LinkedIn or anywhere else you feel like sharing your accomplishment!

Course Content

    1. About This Section

    1. Lesson Objectives

    2. Network Check

    3. Creative Force Customer Support

    4. Check Outbound Domains

    5. Zebra Network Printer

    6. Triad Application

    7. Inbound Requests

    8. Certificate for Domain

    9. Certificate for Windows Application

    10. Kelvin Requirements

    11. Gamma Requirements

    12. Hue Requirements

    1. Lesson Objectives

    2. Navigating to General Settings

    3. General Settings Overview

    4. Migrate Color Reference

    5. Imported Product Status

    6. Imported Product Status with Daniel Jester

    7. Custom Production Types

    1. Lesson Objectives

    2. Defining Jobs, Products, & Samples

    3. More on Jobs

    4. Using Jobs

    5. Products

    6. Samples

    7. The Relationship

    8. Jobs, Products, and Samples with Daniel Jester

    1. Lesson Objectives

    2. Products Defined (Again)

    3. Navigating to Properties

    4. Reserved Properties Overview

    5. Reserved Property: Product Code

    6. Product Code Creation Example

    7. What About Size?

    8. Developing Product Codes

    9. Activity: Developing Your Own Product Codes

    10. Intro to Style Guides

    11. Reserved Property: Category

    12. Category Examples

    13. Category Example: Gender

    14. Category Example: Age

    15. Activity: Developing Your Own Categories

    16. Additional Reserve Properties

    17. Style Code

    18. Vendor Material Code

    19. Activity: Identifying Additional Reserve Properties

    20. Custom Properties

    21. Custom Property Use Case: Age & Gender

    22. Custom Properties: Noting Promotional Events

    23. Custom Properties Use Case: Season

    24. How to Add Custom Properties with Daniel Jester

    25. Activity: Identifying Custom Properties

    26. Reviewing Your Assortment Sheet

    1. Lesson Objectives

    2. Defining Jobs, Products, and Samples

    3. Understanding Samples

    4. Sample Codes

    5. Sample Size

    6. Other Reserved Properties

    7. Custom Sample Properties

    8. Custom Properties Use Case: Sample Source

    9. Custom Properties Use Case: Sample Type

    10. Custom Properties Use Case: Promotional Event

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