As part of the design team at Machinas, one of our main client was Esprit. We were in charge of making their newsletters and all the content on the website (banners, games, clothing etc...).
My first tasks there were to translate all of this content into 16 different languages, which was taking a lot of time and I suggested to the team we automate this by the means of Photoshop actions and some Javascript script.
The old process of translating and saving the banners and newsletters
Doing this manually was extremely time-consuming and I knew there was a way to automate this, gain a lot of time and be able to focus more on creating the visuals rather than copy/paste/hide/show/save for hours.
I teamed up with a very talented man from the dev team, Eric Lehmann to discuss what we needed. We built a page with a simple upload form that was transforming the basic Excel file that we received from the translation agency into a script to run in Photoshop.
This video shows the script working from A to Z
It didn't fully erase human interaction as the text was copied on one line, so we needed to adjust it, add line breaks, double check the spacing, and move it according to the image below. Some languages were longer than others and needed to be placed somewhere else. But it drastically reduced the time to add the text into the Photoshop file.
However, this came with some restrictions and the script needed specific formatting in the Excel file to work. As a result, I built a guideline video to help trouble shoot any errors that could occur.
Troubleshooting the countryversions.script
Next step was to gain time on saving, still working with Eric Lehmann, we built another script to automate the saving. The script was automatically hiding and showing group layers that had to be named specifically (de-DE, fr-CH, fr-FR, se-SE etc...) so the script would recognise a "language group layer". Then it would automatically save in a location defined at first and create a different file for each language, using the group layer name for the file name.
We were already saving a lot of time to the whole team, but I decided I didn't want to stop there and looked into Photoshop actions. There was an easy way to create a template for each of the type of deliverables we had, and then automatically create the file for the designer to start designing. You can see the whole process in the video below.
Templates actions for banners and for text and how to use them
The bigger next step
As mentioned earlier, we had to follow very strict guidelines to build the banners and newsletter. For this we had local pdf files that we were referring to, but were sometimes outdated and not replaced, or deleted by mistake.
This was getting problematic on a larger scale so I decided pro-actively to work on a Wordpress solution that would act as a wiki for all the guidelines of the clients we had. This wasn't requested by my boss but I thought this would add a great value to the way we work, we could refer to a specific guideline with a simple link and keep it updated much more easily.
This could then become the place to refer to guidelines about days-off, sick days, where to eat around the office, how to get the residency permit and all those things that were asked regularly on the chat.
I unfortunately just have the assets of the Wordpress and didn't take screenshots of it before leaving but below is the first wireframe that I created to explain the concept to the team.
First wireframe of the guidelines wiki for Machinas designers
I left for Oracle while working on this project. It was about to go live before I left, as I had manually redid all the guidelines on it, and was even planning on extending this to the dev team and PMs. I don't know to this date if they kept it, as I could tell I was the only one investing time in it and even though Wordpress is accessible, I think most of the designers were afraid to get into it and I'm afraid this project died when I left.
However I am very proud of the improvements that I brought in the design process for this specific use cases, and all my colleagues were grateful of the time that me and Eric made them save.