You start a design project, get struck by inspiration, throw on your headphones, and fall deep into the creative zone.

Your design software becomes your instrument, your fingers dancing across your keys, and then you have to track down that logo.

And it can't be found anywhere.

It's like it just vanished.

Nothing takes you out of the zone quite like this. But luckily, there is a way to prevent this from happening ever again.

You need a DAM.

A DAM what?

No, a DAM.

A DAM what though?

No, they need a DAM.

A DAM what?

No, a DAM, like D-A-M, Digital Asset Management System.

Jeez, read a book, man.

DAM! Now that we understand that DAM stands for Digital Asset Management, let's explore what it is and the reasons why your team needs one.

I'll also give some recommendations on specific tools and how to set up your own DAM system or Digital Asset Management System. But first, what is a Digital Asset Management System?

A Digital Asset Management or DAM system helps organizations store, organize, find, retrieve, and share digital assets from one place, aka a single source of truth for all your digital files.

Your DAM system could be set up using a dedicated DAM software, or it could be organized in a cloud-based folder system like Google Drive or Dropbox.

I'll go more in depth on the tools later, but first, let's talk about why you need to set one up. Why your team needs a DAM.

Digital Asset Management is both a business process and an information management technology, which creates a centralized system for teams to organize and access media files with ease.

It's all about creating a central place for storing, managing, and distributing media files so you have consistency across everyone working in and with your company.

That way, you don't have Sandra using an outdated version of your company logo, or Pedro using a random shade of orange that was definitely not approved by the creative team.

In fact, we don't even use orange here.

What the heck, Pedro? One common problem that a DAM solves is the asset hunt.

When colleagues are constantly pinging the design team to help them find a logo, the hex code for their brand colors, or the project file for your ad that you created last month, it's easy to find yourself putting real design work aside and getting lost in an ocean of disorganized folders.

You'll find yourself racking your brain for a file name or folder location and questioning whether something even exists in the first place, maybe even questioning whether you exist. Setting up a DAM takes that messy pile of folders and organizes it in a way that makes it more searchable, discoverable, and usable for everyone.

That centralization leads to some other valuable benefits, like ensuring brand consistency, simplifying the creative process, streamlining workflows, eliminating redundancy, making more use of existing design work, encouraging your design team to repurpose existing design components, which all leads to allowing your team to effortlessly scale creative output.

Instead of being haunted by past work or starting from scratch every time a new project comes up, designers can focus on enriching the collection of materials that move business forward for everyone else on the team. Okay, now you're sold.

You're like, I need to set this up for my team, but where do you start? Setting up your DAM.

You have a few different options when it comes to setting up a DAM for your team.

You can either use a dedicated DAM software, or like the beavers up here in Canada where I'm filming this video, you can build your own DAM.

If you go with a dedicated software, you can sign up with Binder, Widen, or Brandfolder, which are common among large teams.

This will be much more straightforward since they'll have an onboarding process that you can walk through, and they have dedicated support teams to help you out. And if you decide to go the beaver route, building your own DAM, then there are a few options.

You could use a tool like Notion, ClickUp, or Airtable to set up your own DAM system.

I can't say it with a straight face.

Your own digital asset management system.

All of these tools are extremely customizable, so you can build your own system without the constraints of these dedicated DAM software.

Don't worry, if you're using these tools, you don't need to start from scratch.

There are templates that you can copy as a starting point.

I'll add both an Airtable and a Notion template in the description of this video that you can copy for your own DAM team. If your team already uses Dropbox or Google Drive for file storage, then you're like 80% of the way there, but you may not have it set up properly yet.

So to create a single source of truth, create a top-level folder and call it something like brand assets.

Make that folder easily accessible by making it public in the share settings.

Then communicate with your team that this will be the root of your folder system, so that way Sally and Craig aren't off in the far reaches of Google Drive uploading outdated assets in a private folder that no one else has access to.

The whole point of this is to create a single source of truth, so make sure that your top-level folder is just that.

Inside that top-level folder is where you can start creating subfolders for things like your company logo, and fonts, and illustrations, and graphics, and...

Wait, what?

Oh yeah, you're right, I'm totally getting ahead of myself. All right, now might be a good time to get into what to include in your digital asset management system.

As I mentioned before, your DAM is a central source of truth for all of your brand's assets, including photos, videos, graphics, and any digital files that you need for sales, marketing, and beyond.

To start, include every possible variation of your company logo.

That means versions with just the icon, full wordmark, tagline, and any other variation that you frequently use.

You'll want to make these accessible in multiple file types too, like JPEG, PNG, SVG, and even the project file used to create it in the first place. Next, you'll want to include all of your brand's fonts in all of the weights that you use in a format like TTF, aka True Type Format.

That way it can be opened and installed on both Mac and Windows.

You should also include all of your brand colors with the hex, RGB, and Pantone codes for reference.

These brand colors could also be included in a brand guidelines document that explains how to and how not to use your company logo, fonts, colors, and more. Next, you could also include a ton of pre-made illustrated assets and images.

These should also be in multiple file formats like PNG and SVG so they can be used in a variety of ways.

And as a bonus, you could also include some project templates that can be used for things like slide decks, social media graphics, email templates, and any other assets you frequently create. And if you're doing video marketing, which we highly recommend, in fact, you should check out this video to see why, then you're also going to want to include things like motion graphics templates, project file templates, and music, sound effects, and even stock videos that you can use and repurpose for future projects.

And this list just goes on. You can really store any kind of digital file in your DAM.

So, start with the basics and as you start creating and collecting more assets, add them to your DAM so you can refer to them in the future and even reuse and repurpose them to save time on future projects. And if you want to supercharge your design projects even further, check out SuperSide.

SuperSide and DAMs go together like beavers and dams.

DAMs help you store and organize your creative assets.

SuperSide can provide those assets, from brand assets to digital ads to videos and beyond, with fast turnarounds and the highest quality.

If your DAM is missing critical pieces like branded slide decks or your latest ad campaign is lacking multiple variations to test with, then SuperSide is the perfect solution to get any of those in record time.

SuperSide provides you with a dedicated team of world-class designers and a creative project manager to ensure that you get those assets on brand and on time.

Getting all of your design assets created is completely hassle-free with SuperSide.

Go to SuperSide.com to learn more. And if you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more videos on how you can build DAMs, sap maple syrup straight from a tree and become a pro hockey player.

Wait, this just became way too Canadian there, eh?

Okay, well, you can subscribe for more videos on how you can level up your design and marketing.

Thanks for watching.