Co-founder and co-owner of Cake, Thiago Maia, explains how Adobe’s Creative Cloud has helped the studio grow by providing a cost effective and efficient workflow.
Design agency Cake was founded in 2010 by Thiago Maia and David Pocull, who were freelance artists at the time. After meeting through mutual friends in a local pub in London, the pair realised they were both after a new challenge - something that would really push their creative and business abilities. They made the decision to rent a small studios and set up shop, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Three years on, and the Cake workforce is made up of six full-time employees, plus multiple freelancers, all specialising in the fields of design, animation and motion graphics. Working across so many disciplines requires a wide variety of software and an extremely organised workflow. For Cake, Creative Cloud has provided the perfect solution.
Working faster
"We design and create most of the elements featured in our work using AdobePhotoshop CC and Illustrator CC," Maia explains. "We also use After Effects CC to animate, grade and composite and sometimes create extra animation with Flash and Edit using Premier. So Adobe Creative Cloud is our main, everyday toolset," he adds.
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The Cake team primarily use a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects CC to create their vibrant work
The Cake team has found that the toolset provides many features that aid a smoother, more efficient workflow. "The new live 3D pipeline between After Effects and Cinema 4D is a total winner and time-saver for us," adds Maia. "We were waiting for it to be implemented to make our workflow more efficient. We used to waste a lot of time each day if a client asked us to change something in 3D, as we'd have to render and import it all again. Now we can just update the work in Cinema 4D, save it and it's already in After Effects."
He continues: "The perfect communication between After Effects and Cinema 4D also makes life so much easier when we're working on a big project with more people. Now artists working with After Effects no longer have to wait for 3D renders to get updates – they can work in parallel with the 3D guys and get updates in seconds."
Crossing borders
And that's not the only way Creative Cloud has helped the team out. "We work between our studios in London, Barcelona and São Paulo, so we needed a way of speeding up the approval and sharing of files," he says. "We began using Creative Cloud storage for this and it works really well."
The new live 3D pipeline between After Effects and Cinema 4D is a feature the Cake team had been waiting for
The integration of Creative Cloud with Behance is another feature the Cake team has taken full advantage of. "We have a Behance account, and this new feature really helps us to publish the work we do faster and keep it organised," Maia smiles.
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"Overall, we're happy with the new Creative Cloud update and service. It's a lot easier to keep everything updated in the studio and it helps us work between different computers. After Effects CC has made the most difference to us as a studio. It's really helped us to speed up workflow and simplify some of our processes."
Maia continues: "It's a huge jump for After Effects, and has changed the way we work a lot. There's a lot to learn about this new version and we're really excited to see what we can achieve with it."
