On Barbie’s 65th anniversary, Adobe and Mattel bring Firefly Generative AI features

Adobe and Mattel team up on Barbie's 65th anniversary

Adobe and Mattel have been partnering for decades. On Barbie’s 65th anniversary, Adobe announced a new initiative with toy manufacturing and entertainment firm Mattel for the Adobe Firefly Generative AI.

Mattel’s design teams use a suite of Adobe products, including Creative Cloud tools like Substance 3D to ideate with 3D mockups. Designers use the mockups to pitch different concepts, without needing to create physical prototypes. Adobe says that the Firefly Generative AI will further accelerate these workflows.

How Adobe Firefly can speed up the design process at Mattel

All packaging concepts at Mattel begin as rough sketches (also known as 'bluelines'). The design team creates multiple options and then iterates on them, as the initial concepts move through feedback and review cycles. This process can often be time-consuming as designs are fine-tuned with stakeholders. Adobe says that the Firefly Gen AI allows creatives to reach high-fidelity results faster, thus achieving earlier and stickier alignment.

Generate high-quality imagery with Adobe Firefly instantly

Now, with simple text prompts, Mattel designers use Adobe Firefly Gen AI to generate high-quality imagery and colour palette ideas instantly. It allows other teams to see a rendering that’s close to what the final packaging would look like.

In this ideation stage, designers working in Adobe Photoshop can easily edit and enhance the AI-generated concepts, polishing the images further using Generative Fill and Generative Expand to add or remove elements.

“The power of Adobe Firefly generative AI is that it can take what we have in our heads and more accurately portray that vision on digital paper,” said Sal Velazquez, Barbie Staff Packaging Designer at Mattel. “Not only can we capture the full effect of colours and design elements, there’s also inherent creativity in experimenting with Gen AI that allows us to get to cool places that we may have never arrived at, otherwise.”