MEDIUM Footwear Inc.

Best foot forward

Adobe Creative Suite 2 software provides one-stop shop for design and brand building

MEDIUM Design Group was founded with a novel idea in mind: Instead of hiring designers, keeping them in the background, and taking their designs to market primarily for the benefit of the company, MEDIUM places independent designers in the limelight. Their names appear on the items they design, and they share in the profits.

"MEDIUM Design Group is a commercial platform for independent designers that gives them access to lifestyle markets," explains Scott Milden, founder and CEO of MEDIUM. "Designers generate the great ideas and then we manufacture the items and bring them to market on the designers' behalf."

From mocs to messenger bags

Equipped with creative authority and the power to put their best work forward, MEDIUM designers made their initial mark by creating a unique line of athletic-inspired footwear that some have aptly described as luxury sneakers. MEDIUM has since expanded into luggage and is the design force behind the limited-edition Adobe messenger bag, the ultimate bag for the digital creative professional.

"The messenger bag symbolizes a concerted effort between MEDIUM and Adobe to forge a union of design and technology," says Scott Milden. "From concept to creation, the product embodies the essence of creativity while satisfying the functional needs of designers."

MEDIUM designers started by electronically tracing the bag's parts in Adobe Illustrator® CS2 software and then generated realistic colored renderings in Adobe Photoshop® CS2 software. Ready for review, the design was converted to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and e-mailed to other designers or posted to the MEDIUM website, which is created and managed using Adobe GoLive® CS2 software. Designers then used Adobe Acrobat® Professional 7.0 software to comment electronically and collaborate on the design. For print marketing materials, MEDIUM uses Adobe InDesign® CS2 software.

These same tools and processes are used to develop MEDIUM's signature footwear line. Adobe Creative Suite 2 gives MEDIUM a systematic way of expediting, managing, and controlling the creative process. "The scope of Adobe Creative Suite 2 is amazing," says Coleman Horn, MEDIUM chief design officer. "It's one-stop shopping for creativity."

The Adobe messenger bag is the result of an innovative collaboration between Adobe and MEDIUM Design Group with Adobe Creative Suite 2 serving as the cornerstone of the project. From concept to creation, the product embodies the essence of creativity while satisfying the functional needs of designers.

Designers formerly with top shoemakers like Nike, DC Shoe Company, and Simple Shoes initially founded MEDIUM to make shoes that are a breed apart. "This is footwear by designers, for the design-minded," explains MEDIUM Executive Producer Kevin Milden. "When people think of luxury sneakers, MEDIUM is quickly becoming the only choice."

With the ever-expanding distance between market leaders and the competition, MEDIUM believes the only way for a company to compete is at the brand level. To succeed, superb design and branding are behind everything MEDIUM does. "Brands like Apple, Volkswagen, and Adobe drive customer loyalty, passion, and emotion," says Scott Milden. "That's the type of brand we're building at MEDIUM."

Adobe Creative Suite 2 proves instrumental

Adobe Creative Suite 2 expedites MEDIUM's workflow, from initial shoe and luggage design to creation of catalogs and websites. Designers start by tracing shoe or luggage parts using the Bezier tools in Illustrator CS2, an option that combines the precision of CAD software with the intuitiveness of graphic design software.

From there, designers bring drawings into Photoshop CS2 to generate realistic product renderings, scanning in materials such as metal, leather, and ribbon for accuracy. Once they've completed renderings, designers use Photoshop CS2 to create color-ups. "Using Photoshop CS2, we can produce 18 color-ups in an hour. That would have taken four days in the past using manual processes," says Horn.

Development time cut by two-thirds

Ready for review, designs are converted to Adobe PDF files and e-mailed to designers or posted on the web using GoLive CS2. Designers then comment electronically using Acrobat to provide accurate, detailed input. With immediate feedback, designers can obtain signoff in as little as an hour and then e-mail final drawings to the factory in Asia for prototyping.

When prototypes of the Adobe messenger bag arrived from the factory, for instance, designers photographed it and used Illustrator CS2 to draw callouts on the bag with instructions on what to change. "We've improved communication with our manufacturers," says Horn. "To take a bag from drawing to finished in a week, that's amazing."

Kevin Milden swears by GoLive CS2 for creating and updating the MEDIUM website because it's intuitive and tightly integrated with the rest of Adobe Creative Suite 2. "I love having the Adobe interface on a web development application," he says.

To market with InDesign CS2 and GoLive CS2

For print marketing materials, ranging from 60-page product catalogs to shoeboxes, MEDIUM relies on Senior Designer Tu Pham. "Adobe Creative Suite 2 allows me to be creative in a million ways and work efficiently," says Pham. "The smooth integration between Illustrator CS2, Photoshop CS2, and InDesign CS2 is crucial because I'm always working in all three at the same time."

Pham can place native Photoshop files into InDesign CS2 — where layers remain intact — and, after working on an image, click back to Photoshop CS2 for an updated image. Pham initially switched from QuarkXPress due to InDesign CS2 software's ability to generate Adobe PDF files quickly for sending ads to publications and for interim design reviews and proofs. With Acrobat, designers can use markup tools to make comments and send them back to Pham.

MEDIUM designers' names appear on the items they design, and they share in the profits. Their enthusiasm, talent, and attention to detail come through in everything MEDIUM creates.

Adobe start to finish

Though each has a distinct style, MEDIUM designers are single-minded when it comes to Adobe Creative Suite 2. "Adobe Creative Suite 2 gives us more 'front time' for design and allows us to translate our visions quickly and efficiently into final products — shoes, luggage, catalogs, websites — and communicate better and faster with vendors," says Horn.

For MEDIUM, Adobe Creative Suite 2 is pivotal for both design and brand building as productively and efficiently as possible. Concludes Scott Milden, "The importance of Adobe Creative Suite 2 for a small business like ours is incredible. It really can't be overstated."