Building On-brand Teams with Adobe Express

[Music] [Chloe McConnell] Hello, everyone, and welcome to our session where we're going to talk to you today about how Adobe Express can help you empower your massive cross-functional teams to all create on-brand. Today is going to be a bit of a whirlwind, a lot of new ideas, and a lot of new workflows, so let's jump right to it. My name is Chloe McConnell. I'm a Director of Product on Adobe Express based in Berkeley, California, and my Adobe roots run deep, all the way back to my first job where I use InDesign to build layouts at the New Yorker Magazine. And I am joined today by my partner in crime, Brad. [Brad Soroka] Hi, everyone. I'm Brad Soroka. I'm based in San Diego. I'm a Group Design Manager for Adobe Express, and I've been using Adobe products for longer than I haven't. That's over half my life. I even just earned an Illustrator hat for it. Just kidding. I bought this at the Adobe MAX. Amazing booth last year. So we work directly on this product. You're going to hear all of this products for firsthand from us, and any feedback you give us goes directly to the team.

All right, let's jump into what we're going to learn today. It's going to be a whirlwind like Chloe said. We have connected Photoshop and Illustrator workflows with Express, easy high quality animation, presentations and charts, AI-generated campaigns, collaboration, and my personal favorite, on-brand templates with control locks and permissions. And so much new goodness in there that wasn't there last year around. Cannot wait for you to see it. So for those of you who don't know Express yet, though, it is an all-in-one AI content creation app that empowers absolutely everyone. Now what does that mean? Express makes it incredibly easy to make almost anything. That's graphics, videos, animations, website, drawing, presentations, and even long form documents with text reflow. But you can push the limits of your imagination with generative AI workflows powered by Firefly. You can also work across desktop and mobile to collaborate and design on the go and connect your workflows with Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Document Cloud. And finally, Express is collaborative at the core, which means it's absolutely effortless to work across your team. Now on the Adobe Express team, we truly believe in talking to users all the time. And through countless of hours of research, we found these two main workflows are where creating on-brand is the biggest struggle. The first one is marketing campaigns. We've learned that the scale, velocity, and personalization of digital media puts a lot of pressure on content creation teams. Designers just can't keep up with the speed and the volume of digital content, let alone keep track of hundreds, if not thousands of people within their organization who all have to create on-brand. So those designers and marketers listening in, I'm sure you've stumbled upon off-brand content out there in the wild, and it is incredibly frustrating. The second big workflow that we've uncovered is business communications. We've learned that tight timelines and disconnected workflows across functions make it feel almost impossible to deliver professional on-brand business content, like presentations, video tutorials, or email campaigns. So for those of you listening in who are in HR, or sales, or frankly, any function that has to create high stakes, highly visual content for communications, you know how stressful it is to create that content under a deadline. Now that is where we're hoping that Adobe Express comes in to solve your on-brand creation woes across your team. Now it all starts with a designer who's working in Creative Cloud and collaborating with their marketer to design and align on the brand foundations. After that, the designer can create a brand style, brand assets, brand templates, lock them all down, and then distribute them across the organization. So the marketer can use them for brand campaigns, and everyone in the organization can use them for on-brand business communications. So now it's time to jump into the app and see this workflow come to life so that you can use it across your team. So I'm going to hand it off to Brad. All right. So for today's demos, we're going to be using a fictitious brand called Live Well. It's a beautiful brand created directly from our Express design team. This is a franchise health food restaurant with hundreds of locations globally. And this brand is near and dear to our hearts since Chloe and I are both vegan and veggie health doors, aren't we, Chloe? We sure are. It's one of the earliest things we learned about each other. Yes. We also have another thing in common. We love matcha. Oh, my gosh. Matcha every day.

So for Live Well, each restaurant location has a lot of things they need to do. They have to create menu specials, sales, events, promotions, local partnerships, and other regional specific needs for posting to social media. But they need to do all of that and stay on-brand. It's a big task to coordinate across that many locations. And this is where Express in the Adobe ecosystem save the day. So let's jump in.

So as the marketing and brand designer for Live Well, I've been working with my team in Illustrator to create logos, graphics, color palettes, and a whole lot more. And just for the finishing touch, I'm going to show you how quickly it is to add one of my last graphics to a library. And this library, which we're using as a brand, is going to show up across all of the Adobe products, including Express. So here you can see it quickly added right there. I've also been working in Photoshop, and this has just been the place where I have been working. Historically, before using Express, it made a lot of sense to use Photoshop for this type of layout. But now that I'm going to migrate my stuff over to Express, you're going to see how quickly it is to take something like this and bring it to life through animation, as well as share it with my team for reuse.

All right, so let's jump over to Adobe Express. This is the home base for everything you need. It has all the social sizes you can think of. It has hundreds of thousands of templates, and has tons of ways to create fast and easy with quick actions and AI.

And you can also use brands, a great way to stay connected with folks working in different functions who aren't necessarily designers. All right, so I'm going to show you how I can quickly bring in this Photoshop file. So I've been working on this. I have it here on my desktop. All I have to do is drag and drop this in, and I'm given two choices. The first is to keep this as a linked file, which means if I wanted to reuse this across multiple designs, I could do this with the same as Illustrator too, where anytime I make the update to the source file, you would see a cascade across all the products. Now in this case, I want to turn this into an actual Express file so that I can bring it to life.

Now what it's doing now is analyzing the product or analyzing the file. You're going to see all the images show up high resolution. You're going to see all of the fonts translated, all the brand colors intact, any shapes, any logos. All of this is going to be coming to life in Express and easily editable. And here we are. Look at that, perfectly converted. Everything is editable. We have all of our fonts and brand colors intact, logo. Amazing. All right, that was super easy. So now I'm going to bring this to life. So in this case with Live Well, I want to make this into an Instagram ad, right? Take this otherwise static asset and start adding some animation to it. So I really like these drop animations here. So I'm going to do a couple of these, and then I'm going to select every one of these and do a little bit of batch animation here and make this drop in as well. I can also fine-tune it and make it a little bit slower. Let's make this about a second. Let's fine-tune this one as well.

Okay, so I have a couple of things dropping in, and last thing I'm going to do is just animate this up...

And then we'll speed that up.

Okay, now as I'm doing this, take a look down here. This scene is coming to life, and I can scrub back and forth and see how all my work is animating. And as I do that, I noticed that one more thing I'd like to bring to life is this little piece of text here. So let's just make that drift in real quick, and we'll speed that up as well. Okay, this is looking good. We have our animated story. Now that I brought this to life through motion, I'm going to turn this into a campaign. Now the first thing I'm going to do is use this awesome translate tool. So if we take a look here, we have Live Well and it's based in the US, but we have locations all over the world. So I'm going to add our French location here, as well as our Portuguese location. Okay. Now all I have to do is through AI quickly translate that and just within a click, I now have three ads. All right, now something else I want to do to localize these is based in this French one here. Now they don't use eatery. What they actually use is a different name. So in the Live Well collection of libraries, we actually have different versions of our logos based on locales. So this one is cafe, quickly updated that. And the animation, anything we do is actually kept intact too. All right. And let's go to the last one here. Eatery here is actually referred to as...

Cozinha. All right. So now let's look at our multi-page view. We now have three ads. Now the last thing I want to do for this one, with the sips at sunset, and this particular beverage in the US, it's not quite ready yet. So it's actually going to be ready and coming soon, but it does exist in the other locations. So what I'm going to do is jump back over-- Actually, I'm going to jump into the brand...

And quickly jump down here, and we can see our assets, right? So I'm going to bring this little coming soon badge in here. Quickly rotate it. And since everything else has some animation, I'm going to make this one drop in too, nice and quick. All right. And because this looks so good, I think I can use this more than just in Instagram ads. I can actually bring this to life in for other purposes. So I'm going to turn this into a flyer and a poster, duplicate those. Oh, my gosh, that was crazy fast. Just going to do some tweaking here. Oh, that was so fast. I mean, I felt like I barely even touched the mouse before it actually resized. That was wild. Okay, so now we have five different ads...

Within the click of a few buttons.

All right, now-- Oh, one thing I just realized, I'm not really loving the treatment of that orange. We already have a lot of orange going on here. It feels like it's not the right contrast between the text and the graphic behind it. So I want to tweak this image here. Now I'm going to go back to my Illustrator file, and if you recall, it's living right here. Now if I edit this...

And select this graphic here...

All I need to do is jump over to my palettes, and let's change it to that. Yeah, that looks nice. That feels much better. Oops. Okay. So I'm going to save this. And you're going to see that it's been updated in my library. And because this library is connected across the Adobe Creative Cloud, look my linked assets have changed within a microsecond. I'm notified in my other products that it's been updated. And now we're going to see that it changes across the entire experience.

Okay, and there we go. Now it didn't just change in one place, it changed in three different places, and it kept all of that animation intact. So it's insane how quickly it was to bring this thing to life, bring in animated assets, update them, and not have to do any additional work.

All right, so within essentially seconds, I made assets in Illustrator and Photoshop, five multinational mixed media ads, and I can share this easily with my creative team.

All right, now I'm going to do something a bit more sophisticated with animation. So I've been working in this Instagram story or Instagram reel ad, and I want to empower my branch managers, the busy ones running the restaurants to make their own versions of these stories. So each one of these elements animates in, there's some text, and I've also created a space for the city and address. And now this is where the beauty of locked templates comes into play. I've already locked some of these things, but I'm going to show you what this means. So in a typical design, you would essentially just have objects here, right? You would have your text, you would have images, and you would have some other elements here. Now what I've done is I've completely locked this down. Let me just show you what that means. That means I took a regular piece of text and I locked it, which means you can't do anything with it. Now this one here, what I'm going to do is lock, and allow, and replace. This means that when I share it with the branch managers, they will be able to edit the text, but they won't be able to change the fonts, the size, the colors, the animations, and that's a good thing. They don't have to worry about that. All they need to do is just customize this for their locale, and the rest is done for them. Any one of these images that has animation will do the same. All right, so I'm going to Lock and Allow Replace.

And if you scrub through here, you can see every one of these is already preset. All right, this is looking good and ready to share.

All right, so...

Next...

All I need to do is make this a template. Now I have a couple options here. One is adding a note. So I can just say replace the images and images, captions, and dotted line text.

Okay. And this is the crazy part. This is one of my favorite parts of this whole experience here. Look what I get to do. So it clearly-- Brad doesn't trust me at all. Got to lock it all down. I have so much faith in Chloe as a partner, as a strategic product manager, and in this role as a branch manager, but I don't want to stress Chloe out with all of these other choices. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to lock down the colors, the fonts, and I can even disable Adobe Media or Adobe Templates, which means if I just want the reusers of this to pull from specific libraries, then I can lock that down as well.

All right, and last thing we can do is limit the layers for being added to this. All right. And if I do have partners that I want to enable the ability to unlock, I can. And by doing that, I can just enter in a password. All right, so all of those restrictions are saved. I'm going to save this template. It's saving to my Live Well brand right here, and while that's being saved, I am going to add...

Chloe. Now because she's already part of a project in the team, her information comes up real quickly. I am going to add her.

Okay. And now she's in. All right, so let's switch over to Chloe, and you can show them how it's done. All right. Thank you so much, Brad. So here I am playing the role of the general manager of the Toronto branch of Live Well Eatery, city where I was born and raised and near and dear to my heart. So as a general manager, I wear a ton of hats. I do all the hiring, I do the corporate communications, and I also have to do a lot of marketing. And that is why I'm very excited to use Adobe Express because I've learned that I can leverage these brand assets that my designer, Brad, put together so that I can do all of the above more quickly. So let's jump in. The first thing I'm going to do is move over to my email and accept the brand that Brad shared with me so that I can use this brand to be able to start my content creation process. I can use the logos, the fonts, the colors, but also have all of these assets and have a view all of these incredible templates as starting points. So I'm going to start and look at this first template here, which is an Instagram reel, and I'm going to start to create from this file. And I'm going to use this Instagram reel to create a breakfast campaign to promote people coming in earlier in the morning because we're having some slow foot traffic.

So here we are landed in the Express editor with the template loaded, and one of the first things you'll see is that the editor is a lot simpler. I don't have a lot of actions that I can take. If I go over here to Template info, I'll see that this template was significantly locked down, and this makes the whole process so much simpler for me. I don't even have to worry about if I'm creating something that's going to look good or not. For example, if I go to colors, I only see the brand colors, nothing else. If I try to change this and move it around, I can't, so I just don't have to worry about messing it up. So the first thing I want to do is have this be more breakfast oriented. So I click on this salad, click Replace image in this simple editing module on the left, and I can go down to the Assets for the brand. In fact, it's my only option to use the assets from the brand, and pick our new breakfast item, which is this delicious berry oatmeal. I am personally an oatmeal fan. I have oatmeal every single morning. For those of you who say oatmeal is boring, I completely disagree. And I'm going to put in the new title of this meal, berry oats. Awesome. So let's scrub forward in this simple visual. I can see, wow, this animation is awesome. I can never do that myself. And then I want this section up here to be more focused on the morning than just eating well. So let's put in starting fresh in the morning. Oh, okay. And then it's guiding me that that's too much content. What it is, is really Brad in my ear, the designer in the corner, telling me, wait a second, that's too much copy. Can you condense it to make it more consumable for our audiences? So I'll just go back, and it says, we believe in starting fresh. And then I can replace the second item. So again, it's not miso soup because miso soup for breakfast is a little intense, and I'm going to choose this egg dish, and then similarly edit the text here to say eggs. Perfect. Let me scrub forward to see if there's anything else I need to update. And just this final piece for the city, I can specify Toronto. And then the address, I can put in 1100 Yonge Street, which is where this is located. Perfect. And then I can go back, and it's like, "Oh, my gosh. How long did that take me?" 30 seconds, maybe? I would have never been able to create this on my own, let alone in a way this is visually empowering, and it is just going to make my social media look so snazzy. And I feel empowered from going through this process. I'm excited to do more. So I'm going to hit Share and then go down to social media because I want to post this out on Instagram. So we have integrations in Express directly with social media channels. So I can pick Instagram, pick a reel because it's a reel, and then start writing a caption. So I'm going to say new breakfast items, like berry oatmeal, and then Live Well Eatery.

So I'm not that great at writing copy. I'm a general manager, but luckily, Adobe Express has AI caption generation right inside baked into the product. So look at this awesome text that was just written for me in a flash. I can insert that. I can, of course, edit and customize it, but hey, I'm going to say that's good enough for me and keep moving forward, and then schedule this for, let's say, later in the week. So I can schedule that and in a breeze, view the calendar. And when I look at this social calendar, I can see I have all of this content chock-full that I can schedule very, very quickly. So this landed to Schedule. I see there's already another Instagram post that day, so I can just drag and drop it a week as simple as that, and I can build out my campaign for the rest of the month in just a few clicks. So the next thing that I want to do, I've done my social piece is in Adobe Express I want to be able to create a presentation to share with corporate around our quarterly report. So how are the businesses doing? And this is something I want to collaborate on with all of the other general managers. So in order to do that, that's why I'm going to use this new feature called projects. And projects are collaborative hubs where you can add brands, libraries, files, and people all together, so you can all access and work on the same things. You can use projects for different departments, different campaigns, different seasonal work, etcetera. So I'm going to create a new project, call it quarterly report.

Awesome. I'll be sure to spell things right. And I'm going to choose Seafoam green, my favorite color, because why not? The next step in creating the project is to invite people. And so because we are in a Teams account, I can add all the same people, and then they're fully filled ahead of time. So it's easy, easy, and I'm going to put a note, please use for a report. The notes are really helpful because when the email goes out to these invited people, they have that context in terms of why they should accept this project. So within projects, you can create folders for organization, so Q3 2024. You can create as many folders as you want, as many massive folders as you need to stay organized. Now within this folder, I want to create my presentation, so I can go Create file and pick Presentations. Now this is a newer feature for Adobe Express to make it incredibly easy to edit presentations. You'll see the editor is even formatted a little bit differently, specific for a presentation authoring. But I'm not going to start from scratch because I know in that nifty brand that Brad sent me earlier, I saw that there is a quarterly report presentation template. So here it is right there, authored by Brad with the note, so I'm going to start a new file based on that presentation. Now in the editor for that presentation template, I can see that I have a little bit more control than I did in the other one. If I go to colors, sure, I still only see my brand colors, but under template info, the restrictions are less I can add more content. And that's because Brad knows when I'm creating a presentation, I need a little bit more leeway than I did when I was creating an Instagram campaign. So first of all, I'm going to start by updating the quarter, have that filled into Q3, and then start adding my name, the city name-- Sorry, to these slides. So put Toronto here, city name here. Awesome. So I can completely customize these slides to go with our Toronto plan. So let me go on this slide, and I'm going to jump in and edit the new charts and graphs and tables, a new feature we have on Express. So July, say July was slow, 100. August was really slow, 50. September, way better, 300. All very, very real business numbers as you can see. And then I want to be able to put in our most popular items. But you might have noticed as I'm going in, this slide presentation is just expanding. That's because I have my San Diego counterpart right there. I can see his avatar up here and see that he's on slide 3. Adding in all his content, we can live collaborate in real-time and build this presentation. So on this slide, I want to go into Elements and add a new bar chart to show the most popular items. There are so many different designs. I'm going to pick one that's really simple. Oh, my gosh, did you see that? I dropped that bar chart in, and it automatically showed up on-brand. I can delete that last item and just drag and drop it. So easy to manipulate the content and the data, so it can line up and show pizza was the most popular, then salad, then this coconut drink. And so if I go over here and I want to take a look at my notifications, I see that Brad actually left a comment for me. Let me see. This might be better as a bar chart. Okay, yeah, I know that's probably right, Brad. So I'll say, will do.

Thanks. I trust him on all things, data. Thank you, San Diego branch manager. And I can just go to Chart type and then click through different options. There we go. And my data maintains, the design maintains. All I did was just change the chart. So the last thing that I want to do is I want to customize the table of contents to look good for the city. So I'll go, I'll put in Toronto here, put in my name so they know who the branch manager is in Toronto...

And then say Toronto starts on slide 3 so that they can navigate. And I can do something a little fun and different here. I want my personality to really shine through as a branch manager. So I can go to Media and Generate image, where I can use Firefly to generate a custom image that I can't find in Stock. So I'm going to put in Toronto City Scape and then fall.

I'm going to pick this layer paper. There's so many different styles and things that you can put in that I can do that. But at the same time, I see that my San Diego branch manager is generating their image as well. And it's absolutely incredible, all the things that you can try to generate with Adobe Firefly. Look at all of these different ones. Oh, my gosh. I'm going to pick that one. Absolutely. - Oh, that looks cool. - Yeah. Yeah. You like it? General manager from San Diego. Oh, cool. Brad playing his second role today. Oh, yours looks so good too. I mean, that's why generative imagery is so much fun, especially playing with the different slides. So say this is all ready to go. I can add in notes for the slides if I want, I can even add in transitions between slides, easy-peasy. And then I can present directly within Adobe Express. Look at that. And I can just use my key to move forward. Now if I want to share this, not only to collaborate, but actually externally as a lead behind, I could click here, Share, and then View-only link. And then what it'll do is create a public link that's shareable with anyone if we want this to be an external-facing report.

So now that I've created that multimedia campaign, I've created a beautiful on-brand presentation to share back to corporate collaboratively with other branch managers, the last thing that I want to do is to be able to create hiring post. I need to hire someone else in the kitchen, and I need to do it ASAP. And I know because I looked in the templates, there's no we're hiring template that I can start from. So I need to do this for myself, and I cannot wait for my designer, Brad, to do that for me. So I'm going to put LinkedIn post as the prompt and actually filter specifically to templates so I could see the LinkedIn post for templates. And there's one a simple one right here for we are hiring. So I'm going to customize it. Of course, I'm a little nervous. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going off the rails." I don't have Brad in my corner with templates for me to be based on, but I actually do have designer Brad in my corner because if I go over to Brands, we have this nifty feature called Apply brand. And so any template we can create from, we can hit Apply brand, and it applies the colors, applies the fonts. We can quickly drag in the logo. And not only does this work on a single page, I could also use this on a multiple page presentation or report as well. And so I pulled in the logo. Let me pull in a brand asset to show the culture of our brand. There's so many good ones to pick from. Let me pick this one of the people eating. And then the last thing I need to do, awesome.

Perfect. When you don't have Brad at your corner, you have-- Exactly. Exactly. That's it. I just have to put in the website, livewell.com And then it's as easy as hitting Share. And look at that, LinkedIn is recommended, so I can pick my LinkedIn. We are hiring a chef. Generate because why not? I don't have time to write all of this, and I know that I have a marketer in my pocket. And so I can insert this generative content and then publish, schedule it because it's always great to schedule it later. So let's do next week and then schedule it directly to social media. And again, you can see my jam-packed calendar that I've been able to fill out throughout this process, and I can easily move things around. So thank you all so much for listening into this session. This was just the tip of the iceberg for what you can do with Adobe Express to empower your teams to create on-brand, but there is so much more in there for you to dig into. So hopefully, this inspired you to take Adobe Express, try it out for yourself, and then also spread it across your teams to help you create on-brand. As Brad mentioned upfront, as a product team, we always love getting feedback about what you like, what you want to see more of, etcetera. So please, please stay in touch.

- Bye. - Thanks, everyone.

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Building On-brand Teams with Adobe Express - OS510

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About the Session

Join Adobe Express product and design leaders Chloe McConnell and Brad Soroka as they reveal strategies to supercharge your team’s content workflows. You’ll find out how to empower your teams to produce visually cohesive marketing and internal communication content at scale.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

  • Master team branding at scale: Discover how to utilize Adobe Express brand kits, Creative Cloud linked assets, campaign resize, and template locking to ensure consistent branding across your team. Learn how these tools can streamline your workflows and maintain brand integrity.
  • Elevate collaboration and efficiency: Explore the collaboration features that allow your team to work seamlessly together, including asset organization, live collaboration, feedback provision, and more.
  • Leverage generative AI for creative excellence: Uncover how generative AI can accelerate your creative process, helping your team produce high-quality, on-brand content quickly and effectively.

Technical Level: Beginner, Intermediate

Category: Industry Best Practices

Track: Social Media and Marketing

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Business Strategist/Owner, Educator, Government, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Social Media Content Creator, Marketer

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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