Streamlining Social Media Asset Creation with Adobe Express

[Music] [Jack Watson] Hello and welcome to my Adobe Express workshop. Now today we're going to cover how you can streamline social media asset creation inside of Adobe Express. Now if we're meeting for the first time, my name's Jack Watson. I'm a 22-year-old brand designer and content creator based here in Manchester. Now over the last 12 months, I've been able to equip my 9:00 to 5:00 as an accountant, rebrand many amazing startups, and fortunately, I've been able to grow a following online of over 300,000 followers. If you're interested in following my journey, I'm currently documenting exactly how I'm scaling my current agency over on YouTube and Instagram, and you'll be able to find daily uploads by searching for Jack Watson Designs. Now with that being said, let's discuss what we'll be covering in today's session. Now we're going to be starting by creating a brand inside of Adobe Express. This could be your own brand or alternatively, you might be creating multiple brands for different clients. We're then going to be checking out the templates that Adobe Express has to offer. I'll show you exactly how to effortlessly adapt them to match with your brand, utilizing the brand feature, which we'll have just set up. And then once we're happy with our template, we're going to start experimenting with Adobe Express's easy to use animations. Now don't worry, I know what some of you are thinking. You spent years mastering Photoshop or Illustrator and you're wondering if we can utilize Adobe Express's animation features on these templates as well. Well, luckily, yes, we can. And I'll finish today by not only showing you how we can seamlessly upload these templates to Express, but I'll also be showing you once we've finished adding animations that we can also schedule it to be posted across all the social media platforms at the same time by using the Schedule feature which you can see over here on the left. Sound good? Okay, let's jump into it. But before we do actually, I want to tell you a few uses for Adobe Express which have saved me a lot of time in the past year. So let me set the scene. You're about to go on holiday, it's 6pm on a Friday, and you just sent a client a social media graphic, and an hour later, surprise, surprise. Once you've logged off and left your laptop behind, the client wants a quick revision. Now before in the past, you'd have to apologize to the client and tell them unfortunately it's not possible. However, now with Adobe Express, if you uploaded the template to the site, just as I'm about to show you, then all you need to do is open the app on your phone, make the adjustment, and send it off to the client. Now alternatively, you might be working with a client that doesn't have the budget for an in-house design team, and they most likely want to create the assets themselves. You've created the visual identity. You've sent it to the client. And before, you might have had to hold the hand teaching them either Photoshop or Illustrator just so that they can edit the templates themselves. Whereas now with Adobe Express, you can set the clients up with the brand as I'm about to show you, and you can have full trust in the client, not creating awful graphics, which they might have done in the past, thanks to the preset templates which we're about to go through. Now that's just two of many examples where Adobe Express has saved me a headache in the last year, so hopefully after this workshop, it's going to help you too. Okay. Right. So enough talking, let's jump straight into how we can create our own brand inside of Adobe Express. So as you can see here, I'm on the main page of Adobe Express. On the left, we have Home, Your Stuff, Brands, Templates, Schedule, and Learn. So initially, we're going to start by creating our own brand, and I've put together a little test brand before we started this workshop and this is going to be called CreatorCash. So this is a completely fake brand, which I made as an accounting brand that's made to help creators. Just a completely fake brand with fake graphics. So let's create this and call it CreatorCash in line with our branding. Click Create.

And now you can see we've got an overview, logos, colors, fonts, templates, and assets. So we're going to start by uploading the logos. So click Upload logos here. Okay, so I've got all of my logos here. I'm going to start by clicking the first one, which is the black logo. Click Upload...

and you can see what this has done is actually started to upload it into our little brand portal that we've got here. So I'm going to continue to add the rest.

We've got a dark green one.

We've got a green one.

We've got a gray one, all in our brand's colors.

And we've got a purple and white one. So now we've uploaded all of these.

We're also going to upload the logo with the background on as well because we never know when we might need that. Okay, so next, we're going to add the brand's colors. And this is essentially going to upload the primary color palette that we've selected when we've created the visual identity for the brand. So we're going to click Color palette and we're going to name this Primary Colours.

And now we're going to click here and we're going to go on Custom. And I've got Hex codes in front of me. So the first one is 8B88EA.

There we go. Second one is 153A01.

Oh, 153A01.

Perfect.

The next one is ffffff.

We've got the black as well, and then we're going to add our two greens, or our one green, I believe actually, which will be BOEB87.

Perfect. And then finally...

We have a light gray which is all the Ds.

Cool. So then we'll click Add, and now you can see we have our primary color palette in here. The font I remember when I created the visual identity, the font was called Figtree. So we'll type Figtree in.

There we go.

And Templates. This is where we're going to upload our templates later when we've brought them in from Adobe Illustrator, but we'll come back to this later on. Assets, we have a pattern as well. So we're going to upload this pattern, which is this icon here, which is repeated itself, which is the two Cs of CreatorCash stretched out to make an intertwining love heart. So we're going to upload the pattern and then we'll also upload the icon as well.

Okay, so now we go-- When we click Overview, you can see that we have essentially like a mini overview of the entire visual identity all inside of Adobe Express. So then when we exit it, we can see now one of our brands is CreatorCash. So if you're an agency or if you're a designer that works with a freelance designer that works with lots of different clients, you can have all of your clients in one place and you can actually click these two dots here and you can also invite your clients to actually accept this brand on their Adobe Express as well, making the process so much easier when collaborating with clients or when collaborating with other designers as well. Okay, so next we're going to create a template and we're going to edit it using our current brand which is CreatorCash. So let's go back to the homepage and let's explore the Templates. Okay.

So I'm seeing if there's anything that catches my eye here that we can change.

As you can see, there are so many different templates inside of Adobe Express. You've got infographics, invitations, YouTube thumbnails. They have the whole lot. Let's see. So we're going to go for a LinkedIn post because our brand is CreatorCash, which is accounting, and LinkedIn seems to be the appropriate social media platform for an accounting brand. So let's keep going and seeing if there is any template that we like.

Okay, let's go for this one. I quite like this animation. I like the assets in the middle. We just need to change the colors and the font so it matches our brand. So as you can see here, we have-- If we click play...

We have this really flashy LinkedIn post, which would look amazing if we were a business owner and we wanted to create these. Normally, this would have taken us ages if we had started off in Illustrator to come up with the idea in the first place and then to take it over to either Premiere Pro or Adobe After Effects to create these animations. Adobe Express is simply an all-in-one platform which is making it so much easier to create these things a lot, lot faster than before. So let's start by changing the background color. Now we're going to go to Swatches and as you can see when this be loads...

You can see our brand should appear here.

Here we are. So we have our color palette here. We're going to go for this. Let's go for the dark green and then we're going to change this text. So if we click our font...

We're just going to refresh it here...

Just so our brand loads. Okay, so we've got our animation here. Let's click play.

Brilliant. I'm just going to click our text.

And yeah, there we go. Our fonts loaded now. So a quick note to self, if you can't see your brand there after creating it, then sometimes it might just need a refresh. So let's change that by clicking Figtree.

Perfect. And let's change the color of this background as well.

So we're going to click this text and we're going to change the background. So we'll go to Shape and we will click Shape Fill. You see our primary colors here for our CreatorCash. So we're going to click this green. Amazing. And we are going to change the text from subscribe to...

From bookkeeping to financial planning, we handle it all so you can focus on your craft. And then we're going to just drag that down a little bit, bring this up...

And we're going to change this to Learn More.

The image, I like the animation there. That looks good. And at the bottom, we are going to change that to...

Encouraging Creators to thrive.

Now we'll change the background of the sign up sign as well, so we'll click Shape, Shape Fill, and let's go for a purple here.

That looks good. The font needs to be changed as well, so we'll change that to Figtree, and we'll make this just a little bit bolder.

That looks good.

We'll make it Italics as well, and we'll do the same for the bottom. Change it to Figtree...

And we'll go for the Bold, and we'll change that to Italics.

Okay, so now you can see we've got our own poster here, which is a lot more unique than it was before. We've got our own fonts from our visual identity. And if we would like to bring in any elements, we can go over to elements here, bring in any assets. You got design assets, brushes, elements, frames, illustrations, etcetera. We can head to our Brands, and this will be where all of our stuff was that we uploaded before. So the one thing that I see that is mainly missing from here is our CreatorCash logo. So we can choose whether we want our green one or our white one. So let's see which one looks good here. We'll bring in this C. Make it a bit smaller. As you can see, the snap to grid is really good on here, so we can make this in line with our box. We're going to bring these two slightly higher as well.

And let's make this quite small.

And we'll just put that in the corner.

There we go. So now if we play this from the start.

Yep. You'll see that this C is visible from the very start, which will look a bit strange. So to animate this, all we need to do is head to Animation here on the left. And now you can see that there is a wide variation of animations to choose from. So if we just hover over it, we can see exactly what it looked like.

The tumble looks quite cool. We might go for that one. We've got slide, spin, drop. I think we're going to go for the tumble for this one. And if we want to change the duration, if we can see right now, let's see what it looks like.

It comes in quite early. I mean, it doesn't look too bad. Let's have another look.

I think we'll make it a little bit longer. So at the minute, it's only one second duration, so we'll change that to two.

That's really slow. In fact, let's go back to let's try 1.5.

See what that looks like...

From the start.

Yeah, that was good. Let's just change this fonts as well. I've noticed that that's not the right font. We'll increase it, the size...

And let's change it to medium.

Okay, I think we're looking consistent here. Size 40, size 49.

Great.

Okay, so that's how we animate a template inside of Adobe Express. Let's take a look at if we want to bring our own templates in from Adobe Illustrator and edit them inside of the software on the website, sorry. So let's go back. If we bring up our file with our template in, here you can see my folder. I've simply just got an Adobe Illustrator file here, so let me open this and show you what it looks like.

It is very, very simple. Its two artboards. One has encouraging creators to thrive and the other one has it fueling your creative success. A few assets. We have the logo, we have the text, and we have some shapes that we've created. We have again the same here. So let's close that down. And if we want to import this into Adobe Express, simply all we need to do is drag and drop the two templates into here.

And you'll see we'll be greeted with this sign. So this says Start from AI file. We can either add it as a linked image or we can edit the file inside of Adobe Express. Now what this is going to do, if we click Create, it's going to convert it from an Adobe Illustrator file into an Adobe Express file, meaning we will be able to animate it and also schedule it using the scheduler. So as you can see under 30 seconds, 15 seconds it's already been finished. So let's click Open.

And here we go. As you can see we've got the first one and the second one. So I think we're missing a word there, success. So we'll just add that on.

Perfect.

Yep. That looks good.

Okay, so that's in line now with our last one. If we wanted to post these as a carousel, then we will be able to do so. However, just having the standard template isn't enough. Otherwise we could have just left this inside of our Adobe Illustrator file and exported it. So let's take a look at how we will animate this from the start. As you can see we currently don't have the animation bar at the bottom here like we did before, so this is how we would change that. Now let's start by clicking the text and over on the left here, you can see we have Animation. So we're going to click that, and then let's hover over and see which one we like.

Already you can see the post is a lot more dynamic, and if you were scrolling across your LinkedIn or your Instagram, I think this would most likely catch your attention a lot more than it just be in the still image. So it's a really big advantage having these quick animations here on the side. Okay, which one do we think? I quite like the bungee effect, and I think the speed on that looks good as well. So we won't change the speed. So if we click play now, you see this play button's appeared.

Perfect. That's looking good. Now we can take this even further by also animating the shape and the logo. So we'll click the Shape. Is this grouped? Yep, it is. It seems to be grouped with this down here, so we'll just ungroup it.

Okay, perfect. So now these assets are separate. We will start with this one.

Animation.

I think the slide works quite well with the shapes here. So let's click that slide and let's see how that looks.

Okay, the slide might be a little bit fast. So let's click the text and see how long the animation is there. We see it's one second with two bounces. So now let's change this animation to one second as well, so everything's coming in at the same time.

Perfect. That's nice and smooth. Click play.

Brilliant. Now let's click our logo down here. We're going to zoom in, and we're going to make sure that everything is grouped.

There we go.

So now we're going to bring our logo in as well. Let's go to animation here on the left, and what should we go for? We'll go for pop, and we'll-- What's this look like? Just one second as well.

If we increase the intensity, it's very intense, reduce it.

Yeah, I quite like, low intensity there, so let's go for 10.

That looks good. Okay, let's have a look at what our template looks like.

Great. Very, very dynamic. It looks a lot better than it did originally. If we hadn't edited it, then it would look like this, but because we have now whenever we scroll across it on Instagram or LinkedIn it's going to look like this.

Amazing. So let's wrap things up now with the scheduler. Let me show you exactly how we can schedule it. So if we want to share it, we can go down-- We can go up here to Share.

And then we'll go click Schedule post.

And here you can see that we can actually connect all of our channels. So at the minute, I've just got my Twitter connected, but if we open up the connections, you can see that we can connect Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter. So let's connect them. It's as simple as just clicking Connect.

It doesn't take long at all.

Connect.

Brilliant. And now we're already connected. So if you wanted to post it on Twitter and Instagram, sorry, X and Instagram, then we tick them both and we can type our caption here. So you can see we've got three options, post, reel, or story. We want this to post, so we will Post.

Get in touch today.

And we'll just do the same for the one underneath it.

Scroll down, and then we can schedule this for-- Let's schedule it for the September 20, or we'll go even further. We'll go for the October 31. And then if we click Schedule, that will now be scheduled. So if we go back, we can have a look at all of our schedules.

So Schedule, you can see nothing in August, nothing in September. But then in October, you can see both of our posts have been scheduled. So this is really great to get organized. I'm going to delete this because it won't make any sense in line with my content that I'm creating at the moment. But that pretty much covers everything. So hopefully you've learnt how to create a brand on Adobe Express, how to take advantage of the templates, and then easily create them and edit them using your brand that you've set up through Adobe Express. And also how to upload your own from either Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator, or whichever software that you use yourself. So thank you very much. I've been Jack Watson and I hope you enjoy the rest of Adobe MAX. Take care and have a wonderful day.

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Social Media and Marketing

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Streamlining Social Media Asset Creation with Adobe Express - OS802

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About the Session

Join Jack Watson, graphic designer at Jack Watson Designs, to learn how to efficiently manage and create consistent, high-quality content for your social media channels.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

  • Set up brands and upload custom templates in Adobe Express
  • Streamline your social media asset creation process
  • Manage content creation for your social media channels

Technical Level: General Audience

Category: Inspiration

Track: Social Media and Marketing

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Graphic Designer, 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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