Celebrating Adobe's 35th anniversary

Problem

Like so many companies, Adobe started small — but with big ideas.

2017 marked 35 years since John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded the company named after a creek in Warnock’s backyard. Their ideas became PostScript and Photoshop, PDFs and Premiere, and today the company has 15,000 employees and $7.3 billion in revenue. 

To help celebrate the big 35, Adobe asked Tremendousness to conceptualize, illustrate,  and animate a series of short videos highlighting the past, present, and future of the company’s innovations.

Action

We showed how design has gone from desktop to web to mobile devices and beyond.

We helped people see that Photoshop doesn’t just change images, it’s changed industries.

We visualized how data can be used to drive better customer experiences.

We showed why personalized, programmatic messaging might be the next revolution in advertising.

We envisioned that the office of the future is paperless.

We explained how data can be used to drive better customer experiences.

And we showed the huge changes in the world of animation over the last 40 years — in just 30 seconds.

Result

Tremendousness showed all of these things in just 30 seconds per video. The animations we came up with use no words, no voiceover, no actors. The series quickly and clearly covers decades of innovations and gives engaging glimpses of what the future might hold. That’s the power of visual storytelling. 

The illustration style works with Adobe’s grand 35 brand, with the animation approach gracefully bringing these stories to life in a fun way. We accomplished all of this by working closely with Adobe’s Communications Manager and Design Manager. Through a series of collaborative online meetings we nailed down the visual style, the storyboards, the working illustrations, and the seven final animations over the course of just one month.

And when the 35th anniversary arrived in December 2017, Adobe was ready to celebrate it history and to continue building the future.