Lightening the Load

For as long as I've been in the creative-production business (stretching back to the days of 40MB Syquest drives piled behind my desk like so many paperback novels), our work has been characterized by a certain kind of "heaviness". 

Our files were heavy. Our software was heavy (remember Quark Xpress circa 1992?). Even our monitors were heavy, as we were among the first to boast 21-inch screens in a 12-inch world. 

Of course, there was a certain comfort in all this heaviness. It made me part of an exclusive design community, where I spoke a language that others didn't easily understand. I began to see all this heaviness as a kind of security blanket, a barrier to would-be competitors. 

And this, of course, was all wrong. 

Because in today's world, heavy processes and closed societies can't hope to keep pace with the relentless pace of innovation and change. It doesn't matter how talented we might be as marketers and brand designers. It doesn't matter how elegant our concept or design might be. If our processes are heavy and cumbersome, the world will find a way to do its work without us. 

And so, it dawned on me that our purpose at Pica9—most simply stated—is to lighten the load for creative professionals. 

We have to lighten the load for brand designers, who often spend more time managing mechanicals than they do creating compelling and relevant user experiences.

We have to lighten the load for chief marketers by making their operations more nimble, and providing immediate, tangible signs of which executions are working and which are not. 

And of course, we have to lighten the load for local marketers. Because these people on the front lines of our economy—the franchisees and dealers, salespeople and owner-operators—simply do not have time for unnecessary cost or complexity. 

Just yesterday, our head of R&D IM'd me to say me we had achieved an output rate of more than 100,000 PDFs per hour on a single cloud instance of CampaignDrive. That's 28 high-res, individually versioned design files, per second. That's an example of lightening the load. 

The day before that, our head of design showed me how she could install an InDesign template with more than 100 addressable elements (copy, images, logos, legal, etc), in less than a minute. Another lightening.

And it occurs to me that those achievements—which would have been beyond my forecasts a couple years ago, are sure to be surpassed in the next couple months. Because this lightening of the load has to continue. 

Several years ago, we first envisioned CampaignDrive as a "lite" version of our core solution. That was a good idea. But now, I realize that there is no such thing as a "lite" version. The only version of a software platform that customers will accept today is one that is light all the way through: light to configure, light and easy to use, light and fast in performance. To lighten a user's load, the software has to be light. It can't be anything less.

Or rather, it can't be anything more.