Adobe Photoshop’s user base is among the most fanatical and educated of any software program, so each video must provide value-added content while driving either creative inspiration or top-of-mind awareness. One of the product’s strengths is the accessibility of an enormous number of quality typefaces through Adobe Fonts. This is a double-edged sword for design’s perfectionistic community that can lose hours lost in a font-land flow state.
Our objective was to use that humorous designer insight as an entertaining means of highlighting one of Photoshop’s many reasons to subscribe.
It is a truth universally acknowledged in the design community that there are both way too many fonts and never enough. Easy access to Adobe Fonts’ many options via the Photoshop toolbar heighten this experience even more, with seemingly unlimited variety to choose from.
Drawing on this insight, our designers created a sequence of seemingly infinite fonts a designer might flip through. The varied text flashes across the screen rapid-fire, imitating a designer’s flow-state stream of consciousness. The text itself also evolves naturally to reflect the user’s descent into madness, evolving from “just need to pick a font” to, after the sun has set, “it’s been days.”
Our video editors worked with the designers to fully understand their state of mind at this moment, using rapid cuts and dreamy layering to bring the imagery to life. The resulting video tells a single story many ways, and was very well received by the self-proclaimed “Photoshop nerds” we aimed to target.
This video wasn’t just a hit, it resonated deeply with the Photoshop and design community, racking up 906K views, 11,094 likes, and 221 comments on Instagram. More than just engagement, it validated our approach: a small, tightly collaborative team led by designers and supported by multi-hyphenate writers and editors. By creatively dogpiling on the insights of daily users, we fed the fandom with content that felt truly inside.
We knew the insight had landed when users chimed in with their own experiences, shared it widely, and thanked us for making them feel seen. The proof? The commiseration in the comments:
