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Aviation Training Company Consolidating Apple iCloud and Adobe Illustrator
Company Situation
The company operates in the aviation training and graphics services industry, specializing in creating highly customized training aids for commercial airlines worldwide. Their team includes graphic artists and other staff who manage a large library of detailed cockpit illustrations and training materials. The company services over 125 airlines and is midway through a multi-year project to digitize and standardize their graphic assets, primarily transitioning from legacy design software to Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.
Existing Workflow
The company’s creative team produces and updates tens of thousands of cockpit illustrations and related training content. Historically, they managed graphic files using a mix of CorelDRAW and Illustrator, and now are fully migrating to Adobe products. For collaboration and company feedback, PDFs were distributed and annotated manually using sticky notes or Word documents. To facilitate easier company markup, the company adopted a platform focused on review and collaboration but encountered ongoing bugs and lack of responsiveness from that vendor.
For file sharing and internal collaboration, the team has relied heavily on Apple iCloud due to its seamless user experience on Macs. However, the team is hybrid—most artists use PCs—resulting in syncing difficulties as team size and file volume increased. The company also evaluated alternatives like Dropbox and LucidLink but found them lacking in ease of use or stability for their specific needs.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Fragmented toolset requiring multiple platforms for design, review, and delivery, complicating workflow and causing inefficiencies.
Persistent bugs and feature gaps in the existing review platform that have gone unaddressed for over a year, raising concerns about platform viability.
File syncing problems with iCloud after team expansion, especially in a mixed Mac/PC environment, leading to missed file updates and disrupted workflows.
Manual, cumbersome company feedback processes using PDFs and annotations that are not integrated directly with the source files.
Growing pains transitioning from legacy software to Adobe environments during a large-scale asset overhaul.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a unified platform designed to integrate file syncing, review, and delivery into a single workflow tailored for creative teams, including those predominantly working with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files. By replacing multiple disparate tools with Shade, the company can:
- Seamlessly sync large design files across mixed Mac and PC environments with reliability and speed.
- Facilitate real-time company markup and collaboration directly on native graphic files, streamlining feedback loops.
- Reduce dependency on multiple platforms, lowering complexity and administrative overhead.
- Overcome the limitations of their current review tool with a more responsive and actively supported solution.
- Maintain version control and asset organization within one platform tailored for creative production workflows.
Benefits
- Reliable, cross-platform file syncing that supports large, complex Adobe files.
- Integrated collaborative review and markup capabilities, improving communication with companies.
- Simplification of the workflow by consolidating file storage, syncing, and review into one platform.
- Enhanced stability and responsiveness compared to existing tools with unresolved bugs.
- Support for ongoing large-scale digitization and content migration projects without disruption.
- Potential long-term cost efficiencies by reducing the number of required tools and improving operational flow.
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