OpenAsset Powers Magnusson Klemencic Associate’s New Website

During the wireframe process, I was able to take my mock-ups a step further and use MKA’s real photography, instead of blocking out squares and asking people to “imagine” what it would look like. Albums and the ‘drag and drop’ feature made this a quick reality.

As a graphic designer, OpenAsset gave me the ability to move the design along more fluidly and at a faster pace.

Without OpenAsset, I’m certain it would have taken twice as long for mock ups — as I would have spent a large amount of time resizing images, and then would have had to make those images available to our web developer in a duplicated directory.

OpenAsset allowed our team to collaborate seamlessly on our image choices for display on the website. With hundreds of images per individual project, the marketing team was able to create and share albums among the decision makers, vetting each project’s ‘collection’ down to 5-10 key images. This allowed us to tell the essential story of each project visually. We currently display over 1,400 project images on our website.

MKA uses Knowledge Architecture’s Synthesis as the platform for the company intranet. With the Synthesis-OpenAsset Connector, MKA is able to push project information from Deltek Vision into OpenAsset’s project image library. Via an API from Synthesis connecting to a cloud-based custom CMS, MKA’s website is able to access the project index in Synthesis and retrieve images from OpenAsset that the graphic designer has tagged for use on the website.

The integration with Deltek Vision allowed the team to link project photos with project information – finally connecting project photos with the project details, rather than isolating the photos in a siloed file folder system. Associating photos with project information made it much easier for the team to locate and use project images for marketing purposes.

With CMS integration, the website automatically pulls the project’s Hero image to represent the project in the website’s project showcase. Project photos can easily be pushed to the project detail pages on the website without even entering the CMS. I just add the keyword “Website” to the image, and the image is automatically resized and pushed to the website instantly.

Kristine Svelha-Brown

GRAPHIC DESIGNER