DesignTech Services
Fostering a New Era for Designers

The Adobe Illustrator 1.0 was first launched in 1987 with a goal to bring professional illustration tools to the Mac. At the time, this professional vector art and design software was groundbreaking in every way as it enabled designers to create beautiful designs that were on par with their creativity. Since then, Adobe has stayed at the forefront of creating designing software and tools for users worldwide. In fact, today, 90 percent of the world’s creative professionals use Adobe Photoshop. However, with time, their products—no matter how sophisticated, unique, and capable, they are—became complex in nature. As such, designers today struggle to import, edit, and export heavy files, deal with frequent software crashes due to damaged fonts, and troubleshoot complex font issues. All of which have a direct impact on their creativity and productivity.

Enter DesignTech Services. The company has set a simple yet powerful mission to help designers overcome the technical or creative challenges associated with designing in Adobe. They do so by providing design room productivity consulting, adobe training, and technical support services to marketing agencies and companies from industry verticals such as apparel, accessories, and home furnishing.

In a conversation with CIO Applications, Meir Erani, President, DesignTech Services provides intriguing insights into how they are enabling thousands of designers to perform their job with efficiency and utmost creativity.

Please tell our readers about the inception of Design Tech Services.

During my initial career years in the garment business—late 1980s—I came across the first computer-aided design system. These systems can be considered basic by today’s standards, but they were groundbreaking at the time. Regardless, I had an intuition that it was going to be the future of designing. With time, design technology became more sophisticated. For example, the market witnessed the introduction of color printing and drawing applications, such as QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop. Although these proprietary programs were dedicated to the creation of fabrics and screens for fabric production, basic drawing and designing sketching were still dependent on crayons and markers.

A few years later, I left the garment business and started approaching clients independently. I wanted to help designers—from industries such as home furnishers, textiles, garments, and other consumer products—rapidly create multiple design simulations leveraging technology. For instance, I introduced a tee-shirt manufacturer with simple drawing programs that enabled them to drastically revamp their mode of operation and, subsequently, their business. As our expertise received accolades, we decided to be the name of change!

This is how DesignTech Services was born. Since then, we have come a long way to emerge as the trusted name for providing proven solutions dedicated to diverse design environments.

What are the key hurdles that your clients come across?

The files that designers deal with on a regular basis are not like a word or excel file. They are huge (megabytes and gigabytes) and need to be transported from the users’ desktop to the cloud. Rightly managing such files is a hurdle for designers. Every design work is also subject to frequent edits and color changes. For example, computers support the Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) color model, while printers use Cyan Magenta Yellow Black (CMYK). So, whenever RGB is converted to CMYK, the printed piece appears to be different than what designers see on screen. To mitigate such issues, designers need extensive knowledge of diverse Adobe tools and understand multiple technical aspects. This is a task easier said than done.

Additionally, Adobe products span several modes of design, be it a magazine layout, advertising material, or consumer products. Every such project requires the use of different fonts (which itself is complicated) that need to be managed properly. So, we have successfully diversified our business or supporting every operation. Our clientele comprises an entire gamut of businesses, including independent design studios, an organization that designs its own marketing materials, or consumer product manufacturers who have specific requirements pertaining to fonts or colors.

Covid-19 has further compounded the struggle for businesses to exchange heavy files between teams and designers as most of them are working from home on their own computers. Also, Adobe has moved to the subscription model and increased prices after the life of a license. Now, you cannot ignore the upgrades if you want to work properly.

Please tell our readers about the services that you offer.

We make sure that our clients have all the tech tools to gain efficiency in all areas of their operations, be it the creation of an artwork and transportation of heavy files. Apart from just providing tools, we also drive our clients through comprehensive training through webinars to help them seamlessly use all the Adobe tools. We offer both general courses (to give an overview of the newest features that Adobe introduces) and customized training for our clients’ requirements. Prior to every webinar, we understand a client’s work so that our trainers can get a clear picture of their challenges and make the webinars more fruitful.

We usually provide training through our in-house team who are professional Adobe users or hire teachers—as independent subcontractors—from top design schools. We also allow users to directly chat with us to solve any design or technical issue. Keeping the trend of remote work in mind, we use tools like G Suite and Dropbox—alongside Adobe—as a part of the entire design productivity solution. This enables our clients to constitute a cohesive design team even at a time when everyone is working remotely.

Additionally, we have been an authorized Apple reseller for over 25 years and Mac has been the platform of choice for many of our Design clients. However, we do not discriminate and are happy to support every platform. We are partnered with Synology, FontAgent, to name a few. This helps us address all the challenges that our clients face.

Adobe’s products are voluminous and packed with features. Unless those are learned, taught, and applied to the job at hand, a designer is not working at full productivity. We believe every client’s problem is unique. As a result, instead of following a cookie-cutter approach, we assess their work and technical environment to ensure the optimum outcome.

Our team is well versed in the Adobe products and understands how they should be used. That’s what keeps us ahead of a standard IT company that hardly knows the difference between RGB and CMYK color models. Forging such extensive knowledge with our experience, we are helping clients mitigate their challenges and increase productivity through specialized tools, automation software, and cloud services.

What does the future hold for your company?

The pandemic has changed everything. Right now, our focus is to help our existing clients perform their job better. We evaluate our staffing need on a daily basis to address the ever-changing requirements of our clients. Going forward, we have plans to reach out to independent designers who struggle to set their identity. So, we will be able to help enterprises, SMBs, and independent designers.

We specialize in design. No matter what a company does, designing is something that brings value and attracts customers. So, if you spend the time and resources to give your designers and your creative team the tools that they need, you can stay a notch above the rest. This is the philosophy that we strive to ingrain into our clients’ minds.