Adobe has always been a leader in design innovation. As an Adobe Gold partner, the Hero Digital team had front-row seats to all the exciting AI-related announcements at this year’s Adobe Summit.
The star of the show was Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI tool. Firefly marks a new era of creative possibilities, blending AI technology with Adobe’s powerhouse suite of tools. Along with upcoming innovations such as Adobe GenStudio and the Content Supply Chain, Adobe continues to push the boundaries of innovation in the creative space.
What is Firefly?
Adobe Firefly is a generative AI model developed to integrate seamlessly with Adobe’s existing applications, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and other Creative Cloud software. It’s designed to assist creatives in generating images, textures, and other elements based on textual prompts or existing graphical inputs.
Firefly is built on Adobe’s own data, adhering to ethical guidelines and ensuring that the generated content is free from licensing issues. This is a key differentiator compared to some of the ‘Open’ AI tools, where questions abound about the provenance of the training datasets.
How We’re Using Firefly
At Hero, we’re always looking for innovative ways to further the capabilities of the technology team. Firefly has added a strong toolset to the already capable Adobe Suite. Our creative team is leveraging Firefly’s AI capabilities in multiple ways.
Here are a few examples:
Graphic Design: Firefly can generate unique graphic elements that designers can use in their projects. So if our team is working on a poster for a nature-themed event, Firefly can create bespoke images of flora and fauna that fit the event’s aesthetic or local natural environment perfectly.
Marketing and Advertising: We use Firefly to create high performing visually appealing campaigns creative for our clients, as well as on our internal marketing team. (Take a look around our site, many of the recent high impact, colorful images were created by our team using Firefly.) AI offers the ability to tailor the campaign closely to the desired brand look and feel, as well as create several variations that can be tested for performance. This not only speeds up the creative process and allows for personalization but also drives a high degree of outcome-focused campaign creation.
Hyper-personalized content creation: Adobe demoed their GenStudio* tool, powered by Firefly at Summit. Once available, Hero Digital will leverage this workflow to create hyper-personalized content that is brand-safe, aligns with the brand guidelines, and is ready for activation at the click of a button. This will allow front-end marketers to be extremely efficient in content creation while ensuring everything they do aligns with the global brand look and feel. GenStudio will also allow marketers and content creators to simplify and streamline the end-to-end creative process.
*Release date TBD
Benefits of Firefly
Enhanced Creativity: Firefly acts as a partner in the creative process, offering new possibilities and inspiring creatives with its outputs. Instead of ‘replacing’ jobs, it augments our team in various ways. To quote Eric Howell, one of Hero’s creative directors who recently led a campaign creation effort for a B2B manufacturing company using Adobe Firefly, “AI allows us to dream without limitations. We can come up with interesting, creative ideas as we are assured that we will be able to execute using AI.”
Efficiency: It significantly reduces the time needed to create complex designs from scratch, allowing creatives to focus more on refining and iterating designs. Our creative teams have already realized significant process efficiencies, which have led to enhancement of the overall quality of output.
Consistency and Scalability: For businesses, maintaining visual consistency across various assets is crucial. Firefly helps create uniformly styled elements that can be scaled across both brand and performance marketing campaigns
Firefly in Action
Hero’s creative teams are having a lot of fun using Firefly to create value for our clients. Here are a few examples.
Campaign creation for a client with a unique brand look
A B2C client we work with has a very specific brand look and feel. We wanted to create specific campaign ideas using that look and feel, while not being creatively constrained. We leveraged Firefly (trained on the brand guidelines) to create a set of campaign ideas that were fresh and engaging, while closely adhering to the brand guidelines. A process that would have taken us days, was done in a matter of hours
Lamb Weston
Hero’s teams used Firefly to generate unique and eye-catching campaign art that would not have been possible to create otherwise. Simply knowing we have the ability to generate whatever images our creative team can successfully prompt has led to campaign concepts we would never have considered. AI is helping us ideate new creative approaches that open new opportunities with our clients.
Hancock Whitney Bank
We were asked to come up with ideas on the best way to announce their new app rollout through a multi-channel regional campaign. A few of our ideas required very specific imagery to communicate their intent properly and at the right scale. With Firefly, we were able to quickly modify existing imagery and generate new imagery to show, not tell, our client. This approach allowed our client to fully grasp the idea and extend it with us.
Art Direct with a few keystrokes
Another great use of Firefly (especially as an integrated technology in Photoshop) is the ability to quickly add more background to a shot to get the perfect crop. Or to replace a sky to make it look more vibrant, or even fix a weird fold in shirt fabric. All of these are examples of Firefly’s capabilities to “art direct” the shot in post-production, with a few keystrokes.
Watch Out when Using AI
While Firefly presents numerous opportunities, there are several considerations users should be aware of. These include:
Over-reliance: There’s a risk of becoming overly dependent on AI, potentially stifling personal creativity and skill development.
Originality: While Firefly ensures that its outputs are license-free, designers should still strive to add personal touches to make the final product uniquely theirs. In fact, we often recommend the creation of custom, high-quality imagery for our clients’ brand libraries.
Ethical Use and Transparency: Users must be cautious about the ethical implications of AI in creative fields, including the potential to inadvertently perpetuate biases present in training data. It is also best practice to be open about the use of AI, and declare when it is part of the production process
Jumpstart Creativity with AI
Adobe Firefly is a groundbreaking tool that epitomizes the next step in creative software. It not only enhances the capabilities of designers and creatives but also offers new avenues for artistic expression and innovation. As with any tool, the key to getting the most out of Firefly lies in how it is used—to complement creativity, not replace it.
In the hands of thoughtful and imaginative users, Firefly’s potential is boundless, promising a future where AI and human creativity coalesce to create unprecedented art and design.
