Welcome back, everyone! I thought it would be pretty cool to go over a few things with Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark). Previously, I created a couple of videos on creating a logo and videos in Adobe Spark, now known as Adobe Creative Cloud Express. In today’s video, we will create a flyer in a few minutes for free. With Adobe Creative Cloud Express (aka Adobe Spark), we can quickly create flyers. You don’t need a design degree or a background. Keep in mind; creativity is a process that can be learned and implemented. It can be imaginative, and your gut feelings bring it all together. Watch to see Creating a Flyer in action here.
New in your New Job? Know Nothing About Designing?
Do you need to create a flyer? A brochure? How about a poster or an ad? Being a graphic designer helps to know how to layout the images, artwork, using colours and typography. Over the years, I have seen some great designs and well some questionable ones. Many businesses will get a staff member to create these marketing materials, and some have no clue how to approach this. Microsoft Word? No, that’s for office stuff, not for designing!
Use Adobe Express!
Log in to your Adobe Express account or link one of your accounts to get started. I will log into my account on Adobe Spark so that you will see what I see with the free version.
After logging in, you should see your welcome screen here. This is your home page. Click on ‘View All.’ And you can view the most popular templates to different ideas of templates. I am going to click on Flyer in Popular.
While Adobe Express is loading all the different flyers, what it does is, it creates a project under a section called My Post. In the search field, you can expand the search by adding whatever you may be working on. For example, maybe a business re-opening. And it will load templates relating to those words. Or let’s say you want to do a flyer for dog services. And you will see a different set of samples that will load. You can scroll down to see close to 2900 examples for dog services flyers. Let’s go ahead and pick one.
I Don’t Use Templates, But, In this Tutorial, I Will!
What happens next, a pop-up window will open, click on ‘Create’ to grab this new template. Here you can easily change the text, prices, company name and add your contact information!
I will show you the text styles first, as this will have more options available, but it will give you a broad view of what Adobe Express can offer.
Click on the text once, and you should see an interface for text styles on the right-hand side.
You have the option to select your primary or secondary text. Wherever you look, you have the opportunity to add your brand to the design. Unless you want to pay to upgrade Adobe Express to add your logo, I suggest adding the logo as an image instead. I believe the branding will go at the bottom of the template.
What Can I Change?
- the type of fonts
- text alignment (left, center or right justification) or ALL CAPS
- font size
- letter-spacing (in design terms, this is tracking, the space between each letter)
- line spacing (in design terms, this is leading, the space between the sentences or adjacent lines of type)
- opacity (which is how much light you want to show through a text or an object) and
- order (which is layers, you want it on top or bottom).
You can change the colour of the text and objects. You can add a shape to your text. For example, if I want to add a circle to this text, it will create a circle for me. Or I can change it to be a hexagon. Or you can go backwards and have no shape. Adding special effects to your text is a snap. I’ll be honest with you though, adding the text effects could make it harder to read, so go easy on this one! The cool thing with Adobe Express is that you can a style to your text and spin the dial to a suggestion of text with special effects, shapes, and size.
Change Colour, Images or Text
Anytime you want to change colour, image or text, use your mouse or trackpad to select your item. And the side interface will adjust accordingly.
Working with Images
Let’s click on the image now. You have the option to scale the image smaller or bigger or rotate the image. Flip it horizontally or vertically. You can either move the image freely or pin it to the background. By pinning to the background, means it will be flush against the edges of your template.
The next option is pretty cool because Adobe Express will allow you to remove the background. Depending on the image itself, some will be better than others. So, in this case, the scenery behind the dog is gone. And if you want to replace the photo with a different picture from Pixabay or Unsplash, copyright-free images or one of your own, you can too! Within the images panel, you can use filters, by changing the colour modes to different blend modes and adjustments.
Undo or Redo?
Like everything, you have an undo and re-do at the top of the page. The trash can is for deleting. If you are in am image, clicking on the ‘i’ will give you information about the picture. Click on the picture icon will allow you to replace the image as well. If you see the plus sign in a box, this will enable you to duplicate an item.
Working with Text
If you double click on the text, you can change your text. Hit Return to add a new line. Shift + Return to confirm or click on Done. You can also resize the text by selecting the solid white circle, and the middle icon here with the arrow allows you to rotate the item. If you double click on icon or symbol, you can replace one within Adobe Express.
No Adobe Express Watermark! Woohoo!
Do you see the Adobe Express logo in the template? Don’t worry! That won’t show up your flyer! Like to share this with somebody? Click on the icon beside ‘Download’ on the left-hand side, or click on Share, and scroll down to select Share. If you want to post this flyer on Facebook or any other social media platform, click on Publish. And if you’re going to print this out, click on download. If this were for print, I would suggest a PDF as the quality will be better than say a PNG or JPG. Like always, always back up your work as a JPG, PNG and a PDF for future media queries.
And the best part is, you created a flyer that looks better than say Microsoft Word and it was free. A word of advice, remember, try to keep the design simple.
*NOTE: As of August 2, 2022, it was requested by Adobe to change anything related to Adobe Spark to be Adobe Creative Cloud Express