How to save time, as a creative or marketer, using Air Flow
What is Air Flow? Our new desktop app. What does it do? Literally, it enables two-way file-syncing between your Air workspace and your computer. Translation: you don’t have to disrupt your workflow by manually uploading and downloading assets from your Air workspace anymore.
You can download the app below. We've written another blog post if you want a straightforward feature description.
Speed up creative workflows
Put simply: using Air Flow as a creative, you can now access any assets or files you need to edit from your desktop, without needing to open your browser and download them from Air. Just the same, you can simply save completed work to your desktop — and it’ll be automatically synced to your Air workspace, for the rest of your team to access. You can sync and unsync assets to your local drive at well, to preserve space.
Below are a few, more specific, examples.
Photographers
Picture this: you’ve just completed a photoshoot, and you need to get the resulting photos into Air, so your boss can make selects. Just plug your camera or SD card into your computer, open up Finder, navigate to the board (it appears as a folder in Finder) meant to house this shoot, and drag the photos from your camera into that board. Done.
When you and your team have made selects, and it’s time to edit, you can simply open up Photoshop, click “File,” “Open,” and voilà, there they are. Edits done? Simply hit save, and Air handles the rest. You’re done; the final drafts are in Air, ready for use.
Designers
Whether you’re working in Figma, Illustrator, InDesign, Gimp, whatever — it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you’ve been tasked with turning a batch of photos, from a recent shoot, into assets for an upcoming ad campaign. The selects have been made, your photographer colleague has done her edits. You fire up Figma, click “File,” click “Open,” (stop me if this is starting to sound familiar), and there are the assets you need, right there in your Finder.
Need to grab your company logo, or a few other frequently used design assets? Again, they’re right there in your Finder. No need to open your browser and download from Air.
Once you’re done with these new ad units (sure to drive an unprecedented CTR once they hit the ad networks), just hit save. And boom. Now everything is in Air, ready for your marketing team.
Remove obstacles from distribution workflows
Before Air Flow, we had Air Lift, which enabled one-way sync, from computer to cloud. This worked well for creatives in that they could easily save assets directly to their Air workspace, but left the marketers tasked with distributing those assets in the drift, manually downloading from Air. No longer. Any channels you’re pushing creative assets to have, if you use Air Flow, essentially been integrated with Air.
Content marketers
Whatever CMS you’re using to power your blog — Wordpress, Contentful, Squarespace — you can now pull assets directly from Air as you prep a piece for publishing. No need to download from Air, then navigate to your downloads folders, then click-and-drag the asset into the upload box. The asset is already on your computer, if you’re using Air Flow. Simple as that.
This applies to social media managers, email marketers, and anyone else pushing creative assets to the web. How many visual assets are you publishing each week? Every time you do this, there’s now one less annoying download-upload paper cut.
Performance marketers
It doesn’t matter how you split your budget between Google Display Network, LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other channel. You’re now going to spend less time managing the tedious task of uploading refreshed ad units every week. As soon as your designer puts the final touches on said ads, they’re accessible from your Finder. Just hit that upload button!
Let the content flow!
As a Creative Ops platform, it’s our ambition at Air to make every step of the creative process smoother and more efficient for folks like you, who spend each working day strategizing, producing, and distributing content.
We believe Air Flow is a major step towards bettering Creative Ops for every Air user, whether you’re selling clothes on Shopify, serving clients as a creative agency, marketing real estate, or anything in between.