Welcome back, everyone! I have created a series of videos using Adobe Express (formerly known as Spark) for different ideas for small businesses that can’t afford professional services from graphic designers and ad agencies. A friend of mine is starting to create greeting cards for her business, and I thought this would be a significant starting part if she wanted to go this route. Or for those who have forgotten to go to the store and pick up a birthday card? Or worse, an anniversary card? Using Adobe Express can help you get out of a jam! In today’s video, we will create a greeting card. Typically, the cards that you get in the store will have four sides. The cards you will design will only have two sides, a front and back. I like it that anyway, as it means less paper or card stock is consumed or wasted.
No Design Background? No Biggie!
Being a graphic designer helps to know how to layout the images, artwork, colours, and typography. With Adobe Express, you can quickly create greeting cards. You don’t need a degree or a background in design. Keep in mind; creativity is a process that can be learned and executed. It can be imaginative, and your gut feelings bring it all together.
Let’s Log-In to adobe.com/express
Let’s log-in, and I will log in to one of my accounts on Adobe Express to show you what I see with the free version.
After logging in, you should see your welcome screen here or quite possible a ‘Select a Size’ screen. Either screen will work. Let’s look at the ‘Select a Size’ screen. I am not 100% sure if you need to print this out, so we will select the ‘Print’ size and pick a size. I am going to choose the card size and click on ‘Next.’
While Adobe Express is loading all the different greeting cards, what it does is, it creates a project under a section called My Post. I should point out here that there are over 29,000 templates in the search field, so if I want to enter the word happy birthday as an example, you may see an orange banner on the models. These are called Premium Templates, which means you need to upgrade Adobe Express to use these. Granted, we can probably create most of these on our own.
In the Search Fields
You can expand the search by searching for anything you may be working on the greeting card in the search field. For example, maybe an anniversary card. And it will load templates relating to those words. Or let’s say you want to do a congratulations card for a baby or wedding. And you will see the different sets of samples that will load.
If you would like to use a template, select one on the right-hand side. Scroll down until you find one that works for you. Select it, and what happens next, a pop-up window will open, click on ‘Create’ to grab this new template. The template will resize to the size of your project and will load in a few seconds. Here you can easily change the text, icons, and colours!
Create a Card from Scratch! It’s Easy-Peasy!
In this example, I will be starting from scratch. Which means I have nothing on a blank page. I will try to create a birthday card that was a premium template to show you how easy it is to use Adobe Express. To change the white background to a coloured background, click on the white page once. You will know if you have it selected, as it will give you an extended border, as shown here. Click on colour on the right-hand side. I am going to choose a lavender background. I can change this later if I want.
In the next step, I want to add some text to the card. There is a ‘+,’ sign on the right-hand side, click on this to add, and then select text. Click on the button, add your text at the top of the page. Enter your text, and click done or Shift Return. If you made a mistake, double click on the text to make your changes. And click on done.
Move the text? Please make sure the text box is selected as shown, and move it where you want it. for some strange reason, and I have this weird effect or shape on it. Let’s remove that because it’s ugly! Ahhh, much better. Let’s change the font too. Click on type again, and select a new font. I will choose the Bebas font. To make it bigger, I can change the size by taking one of the corners here, resizing it, or changing the size in the dialogue box. You are more than welcome to change the alignment, the letter spacing, the line spacing and opacity. In the end, I think I will leave it what I had before.
Extra Line of Text from the Premium Template
Next up, I will add another set of text that the premium template had, ‘This was the most sanitized card I could find.’ I will repeat the same step as above, click on the Add ‘+’ symbol and select text. Select ‘Add your text’ from scratch and type in my content. When ready, click on done.
Text Isn’t Centred!
I think my second text box is centred on the page? To make sure, I am going to select both text boxes and make sure the second text box is centred to the first text box. Select the first text box and hold down the Shift key to add to your selection. Once you do that, you should see the Align dialogue box. Click on the second icon in the top row; this is center horizontally. I was wrong, and it was off a bit! Good thing I checked! To deselect, click anywhere off the items that are selected. I tend to pick outside of the project area.
Adding Icons (Yep, they are Clip Art Type!)
Next up, let’s add some icons. The icons will be clip art. If you are okay with that, let’s proceed. Click on the Add ‘+’ symbol again and select the icon. You can enter anything, sparkle, hearts or balloons in the search field. I will pick sparkles. The centre of the sparkle at the bottom is an arrow pointing to the left, and this tells me I can rotate my item. Let’s do that to show you what I mean. Again, to resize an item, take any corner and resize it.
Colour? The colour I have is not nice looking, so I am going to change this to maybe pink and change the opacity. On the right-hand side, you have colour. Click on this and pick a colour.
Duplicating Items
To duplicate this sparkle, click on the icon beside the trash icon, the + in the box. This will make a duplicate copy of whatever you have selected. I am going to make a few more copies and scattered them around the card here. If you noticed, I had placed a sparkle on top of the word Happy. I’m not too fond of this look, so I am going to change the layers. So, I will move the Happy layer to be on the top layer by sliding the ordering to the right. For some reason, the background colour and type are not the right colours. So, let’s change the type to be white, and maybe the background of this colour. How’s that look now?
Print It? PDF! Email? PNG, JPG or Email
Let’s say we are now done with the card. Click on download, and you can download the card as a PDF to print it on your printer. Or if you plan to send an e-card, you could personalize it by adding the name to the card and download either a JPG or PNG and email it or post it on social media. If you want to share it with everybody, click on ‘Share’ and pick Facebook or Twitter or any other medium. And the most important thing, there isn’t a Express watermark!
That’s it everyone, have fun making those radical greeting cards!
Let’s watch the video!
*NOTE: As of August 2, 2022, it was requested by Adobe to change anything related to Adobe Spark to be Adobe Creative Cloud Express