Location
San Francisco, CA, US
Brief
Rory J. Murphy collaborated with Adobe on a range of creative projects, including a short-form motion graphics piece for Adobe Target’s social media channels; the Adobe Marketing Cloud & Director Confessions report, a digital and print brochure featuring infographics to engage the creative community; layout and typographic design for Adobe Advertising Cloud, ensuring readability and inviting flow; and finally, storyboards, styleframes, and motion design for an Adobe Target case study created for Marks & Spencer in the UK.
Tools
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign & Adobe After Effects
“...we connect content and data and introduce new technologies that democratize creativity and inspire entirely new categories of business...
The hand-drawn storyboard process for Adobe animation projects transforms creative concepts into illustrated visual plans. Each frame is carefully designed to show characters, camera angles, scene composition, and timing, providing a clear blueprint for 2D animation and motion graphics production.
These hand-drawn storyboards guide animators in Adobe After Effects, ensuring consistent pacing, smooth transitions, and cohesive visual storytelling. This approach streamlines the animation pipeline, reduces revisions, and delivers high-quality animated content for campaigns, presentations, and multimedia projects.
Styleframes for Adobe animation projects are single, fully realized images that define the visual look and feel of a scene before full animation begins. Created in Adobe Illustrator, they establish colour palettes, composition, typography, and character or environment design, providing a reference for motion graphics and 2D animation.
Imported into Adobe After Effects via the Overlord plugin, these styleframes guide animators through timing, transitions, and scene continuity. This process ensures consistent, high-quality visual storytelling and streamlines the animation work-flow for commercials, presentations, and multimedia campaigns.
The storyboard process for Adobe animation projects begins with hand-drawn sketches that bring the creative concept to life. Each frame is carefully crafted to map out characters, camera angles, scene composition, and timing. This traditional approach ensures that the visual narrative is clear and compelling before moving into digital production.
Once the hand-drawn storyboards are approved, they guide animators in Adobe After Effects and other tools, helping to maintain consistent pacing, transitions, and overall flow. This structured workflow streamlines animation production, reduces revisions, and ensures high-quality motion graphics for campaigns, presentations, and multimedia content.
Rory's approach was to space out the content more effectively - I felt it had been produced very randomly and haphazardly which resulted in literature that was not easy to read or digest.
Broadening the use of typographic weights proved to be a great idea as it helped hugely in augmenting the document and giving a far clearer hierarchy of information that the consumer would be able to read more comfortably.
Asked to create a brochure for Adobe’s annual Report - that years publication focussed on Creative Director Confessions which documented a survey conducted by Golin which asked a variety of key questions about the creative industry and where is would be heading in the future and what technologies would be the biggest influencers.
The project had to loosely fit within both the look and feel of the previous Adobe brochures, provided to me, although I was given some wriggle room to make changes as I saw fit.
Utilising a very bright colour palette which were all taken from a set of provided photographs and which, I felt, all worked very well in giving the piece a contemporary feel.
In addition to the copy layout I also created header icons and illustrations to denote chapter headers as well as an infographic which picked out data from the survey and I visualised the information with design and illustration.