Mural.ly : Creative Collaboration In the Cloud for Visual People
by Eric Cruz, ECD of Leo Burnett Malaysia
A few years back, Fall of 2010, we had a typical global brainstorm where 5 offices collaborated on a global project for a leading MNC. We flew in a swat team of creatives and strategic thinkers from London, NY, India and Shanghai into Amsterdam. It was great to see the energy come to life in the “war room”, with ideas, strat lines, scripts, and references plastered on a wall of creative inspiration and output. We then had to capture the mural that transpired in the course of 5 days… photograph the walls and its detailed sections to make sense and sequence of the creative madness, scan the sketches, collect the images, references and words, reconstruct the whole thing in Power Point and then finally send it out to everyone involved by the time they got back to their respective countries to keep the global conversation going. Back then we thought… wouldn’t it be great if we could create a tool that enabled us to do this but virtually. We tried. But work got in the way. Today, three years later, I stumbled upon "mural.ly" a relatively new web app that allows you to fluidly collaborate virtually with intuitive “drag and drop” ease, eliminating the need to print, scan, pin up, gather and organize the beautiful chaos of creativity, perhaps even eliminating the need for physical travel (and visa problems for developing nation citizens) by streamlining the process into one place where everyone can join the party with no hard costs. This dynamic “space” lives in the cloud – where everyone, anywhere can see, write, post, comment, share dynamic links, revise, incubate, build on and edit the elements real time. This is true cross-border creative collabo taken to the next level. It’s also available on iPhone as “mural.ly catcher”, enabling you to capture ideas while on the fly. This app redefines the concept of a “fluid studio” by enabling everyone to work from anywhere, and add ideas into a central digital “war room”. This has got to be the best work collaboration tool I’ve seen in a while. Thank You to our friends in LatAm. Mos Def a leap forward for ideas sans frontiéres.
Here’s the link of Mural.ly : https://mural.ly/#/murals
Other related stories about Eric Cruz:
http://www.adobomagazine.com/global/module.php?LM=news.level1&id=1331635352687
