Adobe tools in design and asset production
A brief that says Adobe usually means one of three things: artwork to produce, motion nobody can build in a stylesheet, or a brand book that has to become a website. Sorting out which is meant comes first.
01Overview
One brand name over a dozen unrelated products
Adobe is a family of products, not one tool. For software work the relevant ones are Illustrator for vector artwork, Photoshop for raster images, After Effects for motion and InDesign for print. Adobe also owns Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce, which is Magento. Interface design happens in Figma, not here.
02Capabilities
Where these tools earn their place
Assets get made here. Interfaces get designed elsewhere. That division is deliberate, and it is the point of this page.
- Assets
Artwork that has to reach a browser
Icons, illustration, logo variants and imagery, authored in Illustrator or Photoshop and exported into what the web actually wants: SVG for anything vector, modern raster formats at sensible weights. The drawing is half the job. The other half is that it does not cost your users a second of load time, which is why this sits inside product design rather than beside it.
- Motion
Motion beyond what a stylesheet can do
Simple transitions belong in CSS. Real choreography, illustrated animation and video get authored in After Effects and handed over as something a browser can play efficiently, rather than as a heavy file dropped into a hero section.
- Brand
Brand material we did not create
Brand books arrive as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign files, built for print and for people rather than for a build pipeline. Turning that into web-native tokens, a working type scale and an asset set is real work, and it is where design system work usually starts on a rebrand.
03Fit
Six briefs that say Adobe, and what each one means
The confusion is nearly always scope. When Adobe turns up in a brief one of six things is meant, and only the first is a job for these tools. Four rows send you to a different page, and one says leave it alone.
| What the brief means by Adobe | What that actually calls for |
|---|---|
| Icons, illustration and imagery for the product | Use AdobeAuthor in Illustrator, then ship SVG that lives in the repository. An icon exported as a flat image becomes a liability the first time somebody changes a colour. |
| Designing screens, flows and handoff | Different pageFigma, and the discipline is product design. Screen design in Photoshop was normal a decade ago and is now a slower route to a worse handoff. |
| A component library engineers can build against | Different pageStorybook plus real code. No Adobe tool produces components your front end can import. |
| Adobe Commerce | Different pageThat is Magento, and it is an e-commerce platform decision rather than a design one. |
| Adobe Experience Manager | Different pageAn enterprise content and asset-management decision, so it is platform integration work. The questions are content modelling and authoring workflow. |
| An asset set that works and is merely unfashionable | Leave itReformat and optimise what you already have. A redraw spends a design budget on the part of the page users comment on least. |
Scope
What we own on the asset side is checkable: format, weight, colour accuracy, and alt text a person wrote on every image. A design that looks right and adds two megabytes is not finished. unicrew has been producing this material since 2012, with 100+ senior in-house engineers across six countries, under an ISO 27001:2022 certified information-security management system.
04Stack
The neighbours of the asset pipeline
What sits either side of asset production, each with a page of its own.
05Questions
Questions about working with Adobe files
Answered the way we would answer them live. If yours is not here, it is a good first message.
Yes, and expect some translation. Print-first brand material tends to specify things the web cannot honour directly (CMYK colour, fixed type sizes, typefaces without web licences) and to leave out everything the web needs (focus states, contrast ratios, behaviour at 360 pixels wide). We work through those gaps explicitly and write down the decisions, because otherwise every engineer resolves them differently.
Figma. Photoshop has no real concept of components, states or constraints, so a screen designed there is a picture of an interface rather than a specification of one, and every handoff repeats the same measuring exercise. Photoshop still earns its place for photographic and raster work feeding into those screens. See Figma for how we run the design and handoff side.
Not as a practice. Our design work is product design: interfaces, design systems and the assets those need. We are comfortable working inside an existing brand and producing what a product requires, and if you are commissioning a full identity programme from scratch you want a brand studio rather than an engineering partner. Saying that up front is cheaper than discovering it in month two.
Not for new work. XD has been left behind by Adobe's own investment, and the practical consequence is a tool that does not keep pace with how design and engineering hand work back and forth. Existing XD files are fine as an input, and migrating them is a normal, bounded piece of work rather than a crisis.
Three shapes, and which fits depends on how settled the scope is. Time and materials is billed hourly and quoted per project, which suits work still moving. Fixed price is outcome based, and only after the first read, because a fixed number on a brand nobody has opened is a guess with a contract around it. Team extension is billed monthly per engineer. The rate depends on the seniority mix the work needs, so it is quoted rather than listed.
Not sure which Adobe you actually need?
Tell us what the finished output has to be, and we will say which tool and which discipline it belongs to. Our side of it is product design and design systems.