Adobe Photoshop

As Adobe Photoshop prepared to celebrate its 20th anniversary, employees wanted to go beyond the usual timeline of product features and tell the story of Photoshop in a way that would resonate with new, younger audiences as well as the core of established professionals who had worked with Photoshop for the past two decades.

History Factory used its proprietary StoryARC™ methodology to connect the history of image-making to the future of Photoshop. We created a story bank used by communicators and managers to engage media outlets and to rally employees internally. We also crafted 20 video interviews that formed the foundation for our “Behind the Splash Screen” social media campaign, illuminating the people who build and improve Photoshop and sharing their stories of challenge and triumph. We worked with the Photoshop team to capture 25 oral histories, enabling the people involved to document the intensity of their multi-year experience in their own words.

 Photoshop has a thriving social media community that allowed our client to share these uniquely personal stories with a wide audience, including 2 million Facebook followers. Our first “Behind the Splash Screen” video received more than 1,000 likes within minutes of posting and more than 20,000 YouTube views in its first week. The video gave Photoshop’s external users an honest and candid glimpse of the reality behind the typically esoteric world of software engineering.