With Photoshop’s 25th anniversary approaching, we wanted to celebrate the software’s creative legacy. So with three weeks to go, we partnered with Adobe to kick off the celebration and set up the tone of the conversation about the software.

Photoshop can stir quite the controversy in the media, but with a powerful launch—and content to rally the community—we hoped to steer the conversation to the amazing things Photoshop enabled, rather than to how it’s been used to alter our society’s beauty standards.

First we browsed Behance, the Adobe-owned community, and invited hundreds of artists to participate by contributing their PSD files. Their files were then animated, and a celebratory video was made entirely out of them, resulting in a PSD file that is a video.

On the day of Photoshop’s birthday, we released the celebration along with several other efforts. But it wasn’t just any video; it used only Photoshop files and linked to shareable content, such as historic logos and timelines.

The celebration boasted powerful elements, such as Steven Tyler’s imagery, work from the Photoshop community, famous movie scenes touched by Photoshop and the original version of Aerosmith’s iconic song “Dream On,” giving the featured artists unprecedented visibility. The video was referenced by every media vehicle that mentioned the software’s milestone, and it rallied the Photoshop community, which took over the web by sharing the video and images from the website. So one day, Photoshop was remembered only for the dreams it helps bring to life.

First, we curated artwork from Behance, Adobe’s community of four million people. Over 100 artists—selected on the basis of how they used Photoshop in breakthrough ways to express creativity—contributed their PSD files. The files were deconstructed, animated layer by layer and sequenced into an animation synced up with the lyrics to Aerosmith’s iconic song “Dream On.” The process took three weeks and used over 3,500 layers. The final product was not only a video but also a PSD file, which was released to the online design community. The online celebration launched on YouTube and rallied fans by directing them to a dedicated website that linked directly to the artists’ portfolios on Behance.

The campaign made a strong social imprint from day one, garnering approximately 62,813,135 earned media impressions and 1.2 million organic views in the first 48 hours, helping artists dominate the conversation about the software. It also reached 23.3 million on Twitter in the first 12 days. The Behance gallery linking to the artists’ work got 200,000 views days. The celebration was also covered in Adobe Inspire, the Creative Cloud digital magazine and even turned into Photoshop tutorials. The campaign received 0% negative sentiment, even after airing on TV during the Oscars and during Mad Men premiere—which is unheard of.