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

As a studio manager, have you ever stood in your high-volume e-commerce photo studio and wondered if there was a better way to manage your creative operations than with spreadsheets and PDFs? Or found yourself frustrated by the lack of transparency you have into the efficiency of your studio’s operations?

As a creative, have you ever found yourself frustrated by all of the tedious tasks that you are required to do as part of your job (i.e. the horrors of file naming)? Or the lack of clarity about what work needs to be done? Or the challenge of communicating art direction between different creative teams?

Or have you ever wondered if there was a more efficient way to work than processing batches of images leading to bottlenecks and teams waiting around for other teams to finish their work?

If you have sat with your head in your hands out of frustration with the old way of doing things and found yourself wishing for a better way of working, this course is for you.

Description

At the inception of Creative Force, our founding team 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. They wanted to identify how photo studios operated and what aspects of the creative process could be improved.

They found that 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  • Creatives working off of outdated style guides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 process different 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.

In this course, we provide you with an overview of how Creative Force is changing the way photo studios around the world approach Creative work.

First, you’ll get an introduction to our concept of “Flow Production,” our idea of continuously pushing assets through your creative production process rather than processing “batches” of images.

Then, you’ll get a walkthrough of the three foundational Creative Force applications:

Gamma, our web application and mission control for photo studios using Creative Force. This is where style guides, workflows, all data associated with assets, analytics, photo review, and internal QC take place.

Kelvin, which brings "Flow Production" to photographers. Integrating with any capture software, placing any and all information a photographer could want about a shoot right at their fingertips.

Hue, which brings "Flow Production" to retouchers. By integrating with Photoshop, it brings every bit of production information a retoucher might need right into Photoshop. It also offers a snappy Auto-QC feature which makes sure that any preset information is followed (so images aren't uploaded in the wrong size or with the wrong DPI on accident).

By the end of this short course, you’ll have a birds-eye view of the Creative Force ecosystem and a foundational understanding of how it is enabling some of the largest photo studios and brands in the world to completely re-think how they handle high-volume e-commerce digital asset production.

About this course

  • Free
  • 30 minutes of video
  • 30 minutes to complete
Enroll for free

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. Flow Production with Creative Force CEO Thomas Kragelund

    1. Meet Your Instructor: Daniel Jester

    2. The Creative Force Application Family

    3. Journey of an Image in Creative Force

    1. Introduction to Gamma

    2. Gamma with Daniel Jester

    1. Introduction to Kelvin

    2. Kelvin with Daniel Jester

    1. Introduction to Hue

    2. Hue with Daniel Jester