Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I've had a fire lit under me by a spark set by Adobe.
Adobe has released a new series of tools designed for us to create social graphics and videos
and the flagship of this product line is Adobe Spark, which we’ll be looking at today on
DottoTech.
Our friends at Adobe have been in the forefront of graphics since the dawning of the computer
age.
Photoshop and Adobe’s Creative Studio are staples in the photography, imaging and the
video space.
Now Adobe has decided to come back to the regular people these days and they’ve released
two products, one was on the smartphone.
It was called Adobe Post, which we’ve looked at previous videos and we’ll return to look
at.
They’ve actually renamed that to be Adobe Spark Post because they’ve also released
a web-based tool called Adobe Spark, which is something kind of special I think.
Adobe Spark was designed for us to create graphics primarily for the social space, for
social sharing and Adobe’s taken all of its knowledge of color and typography and
composition and brought it together into this template delivery system that allows us to,
for free, create some pretty wonderful social graphics.
So I’m going to give you a quick overview of Adobe Spark today.
I think this is actually going to require a couple of other videos because I’m going
to want to go in and deal in detail with post-type graphics and with their video application,
which is pretty exciting as well.
But you basically sign up for Adobe Spark for free and when you sign in, you’re brought
into their browser-based interface which allows you to manage your projects and to create
new projects as well see what other people are doing with it.
Now we begin by clicking on the plus sign which brings us into a selector that allows
us to determine what type of graphic or what type of element we want to create.
Now we can create a post graphic, which is a graphic that’s designed to go into a social
post, a page which I’ll talk about in a moment or a video.
Let’s talk about the page for a second because I think that’s one we’re not going to
use as much.
Creating a web page creates a standalone webpage, not a webpage which is going to live on your
site.
Instead this is for something that’s kind of outside of your normal realm of webpages
that you want to create, perhaps for an event or somebody’s anniversary party or something
like that.
You might want to create a webpage itself.
Now this is a very nice webpage builder but I think for most of us, it’s going to be
the very odd time that we want to use it because it’s not going allow us to create content
that’s designed directly for say our own WordPress site.
So we’ll leave pages for later.
We will touch on video right now, however, and I have to tell you this is not a classic
video like a talking head video like I’m doing now.
But instead, this is for slideshow-type videos and animated video that you create that tells
a narrative.
Very effective.
We’ll be looking at it in detail coming up in another video but we’ll touch on it
right now.
Before we do that, however, let’s take a look at the main thing that we’ll probably
be starting with which is creating a post.
Now this is a graphic for a post.
Now they ask you first of all what text you’re going to want in the graphic so I’m going
to put in, “Visit us online at DottoTech.”
There we go.
So it’s a nice little ad that I’m creating.
So once you’ve decided the text that you’re going to create then you have to determine
what format you want the graphic to be in.
Now this is talking about orientation and size.
Now they have optimized all of these different presets for different social platforms, for
example an Instagram post, a Facebook post or a Twitter post.
If we want to talk a look at more, we add more and now we can see other social networks
and other use cases like Facebook if you wanted to create a Facebook cover image or a Twitter
header image.
If you’re updating your profile at LinkedIn and you want to create your cover art for
LinkedIn for the top header then you choose the LinkedIn cover art and that will format
the graphics for that particular platform, making sure it’s going to fit ideally.
Does this sound like another product that we’ve looked at in the past?
Yeah, it looks a lot like Canva at this point because it’s designed to do the same thing.
It’s designed to create social sharing graphics.
Canva is designed to create social sharing graphics.
This just happens to be Adobe’s spin on that particular process and like Canva, it’s
pretty much free out of the gate and like Canva, it does a pretty awesome job.
I think you’ll agree.
So let’s create a Facebook ad.
I click on Facebook ad and click Continue.
Now it’s going to format the graphic for Facebook ads and it brings us into our selector,
which gives us the idea of themes, palettes, photos and text.
So these are all the different elements that are going to go into our graphic.
Now the cool thing about this is this brings all of Adobe’s skills around color management
and fonts into this place.
It allows us to quickly select all of those different elements that we want to use.
So when we take a look here, we can see all the different themes.
Now just like the smartphone app Adobe Post, which is now called Adobe Spark Post, these
are pre-done templates that you probably won’t use as they are but they create something
that invokes a bit of a narrative for you.
If you happen to like the overall style, then you’re going to go with it and then what
you’re going to do is you’re going to start the elements.
And of course, we’re going to replace the background art to start.
When you click on photo, we’re going to see all of the different backgrounds that
they give us, they will allows us to change.
And actually even before I do that, let me just show you the palette.
We can quickly select different color schemes just by choosing different palettes.
And you see all of those little selection points along the color, these are all the
colors that are going to work within that palette.
I love this concept.
I love the flexibility and the control that it gives and the fact that I can choose a
different color scheme and I don’t have to worry about getting clashing colors but
I get ones that the experts at Adobe say work together.
And I think they know more than I do about colors so this is pretty amazing.
But I want to start by changing the background photo.
So what we do is you go Replace and then what you can do, you can choose from your own Google
Photo Library.
You can choose a graphic that you want to use.
So I’m just going to go here into my main photos, all my photos and I’m going to have
a quick boo and I’m going to find the graphic.
Here we go, wedding graphics from just a recent wedding that we were at.
What’s going to be appropriate for this?
What’s going to be appropriate for—I know.
I know what I want.
There we go.
Let’s take a picture from a speaking engagement that I was just recently at.
And here I am with a whole group of friends.
There it is.
These are all the speakers that were at Social Media Camp in Victoria.
So I position it right there where I want it.
Now watch what happens as we start to play this.
So there’s the group.
You can’t see me so we’ll have to change this around.
So first thing we do is if we start changing the palette, you see how it actually changes
the color cast on the photo behind to match the graphics that we see?
Then this is the part that gets really cool.
Let’s go into the text and they’ve got this text treatment.
They’ve got a little wheel here that allows us to spin through a variety of different
type of graphics that we can position where we want.
And see how you can quickly now just browse through and see?
Oh, I like that one there.
I like that one there.
But I want to cover Bosco.
I’ll cover Bosco, Fanzo.
I’ll cover all the kids.
There we go.
We’ll have all the old people on the right-hand side and we’ll cover all the kids on the
left-hand side.
There we go.
But now you see how you can go through and you can create a graphic that is going to
work for you and play with the colors, play with the styles and play with the background.
You can even go in and you can modify the individual fonts and you can get into all
of that detail.
If I just save this now, I can then choose and I can start adding more text.
I can change the alignment.
I can change the opacity.
What’s that going to do?
Is that going to change the opacity?
Yes, it’s going to make it more or less opaque.
There we go.
Actually, that’s not bad there.
That kind of works right there and so we can still see the people through.
So you get an idea for what you can do with the graphic and the overall post.
Then once you’ve done all of that and we click on the Share button here on the top
and that will now save the post and allow us to share it.
Now we can choose to publish it directly from Adobe Spark or we can download the image to
our computer and then we can upload it to our own website or we can upload it to any
social platform we choose.
So you’ve got some nice sharing options that are built in here.
And you can of course, at any time, go back into the project file here.
Now we see this has been saved and I can go in and I can edit and modify this graphic
at any point should I choose to.
So that’s basically setting up a post graphic within Adobe Spark.
Let’s quickly show you on the surface, the video story and we’ll make this—and the
video story, you will end up with multiple slides.
Graphic is a single slide.
Video is going to end up with multiple slides and so I’m going to begin telling a story.
I have something to share with you is what we start with.
And once we start, they’ve got a series of different templates here which you can
just basically have a quick look at and you can use.
That creates kind of a structure for the slideshow, the animated slideshow that you’re about
to create.
So let’s choose Tell What Happened.
I’m going to choose this one here and it loads then the template and the suggested
graphics.
Once again, everything is modifiable.
So they tell us what we can do here.
We can record our voice so we can actually do a voiceover over the top.
We can incorporate photos.
We can of course play it back and we can share the video once we’re done.
So once again, we’ve got our themes but we’ve also got now music and layout which
will allow us to do a couple of different options for it.
So let’s just choose something colorful.
Let’s get some colorful lights.
There we go.
I choose Lights and now I add these slides.
See, they’ve got all of these basic slides in here that are started and all they do is
they provide suggestions for what we might be doing.
But I’m going to click on this slide here and I’m going to add text.
I could add a photo or I could add an icon.
I'm going to add text to it.
I’m going to say, “Here is a story.”
There we go.
Then I click on the next one, “The story of man.”
I add another one, “Man no longer young.”
Oh, I’m getting a dramatic lilt to my story.
“A man no longer young.
He wasn’t exactly old either.”
There we go.
All right.
We’ve got a simple story started.
So now at any point here I can click on the Play button here at the beginning and we’ll
get an idea of what it’s going to look like.
Now you see how it works.
It basically takes your slides and advances from slide to slide, animating them as we
go.
Now what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t have a lot of flexibility as far as how the slides
are presented and entered but it does have tremendous flexibility in allowing us to basically
change the entire look and feel with a single click of a mouse.
So I just change from lights to grunge.
Now let’s watch the same thing.
And you know what?
This music sucks for this.
You hear the music playing along there?
So we’re going to just cancel this and we’re going change the music.
So we’ve got nice happy music.
I’m going to kind of go for something a little more dramatic, theatric.
There we go.
I’ve chosen a different music theme.
I like this.
It’s working for me.
Is it working for you?
It’s a pretty good story.
I want to know how it ends.
Don’t you want to know how it ends?
So we’ve got an idea how we can modify the themes, which gives us an overall theme.
We can add music to it by clicking on the little plus.
We can add photos or icons to it as well, as well as modify the text itself.
And finally, we have a choice of actually laying out the way that it looks overall.
We have it set up kind of as a single point at a time but you can set it up with two points
at a time or modifying it so that the text appears on one side or the other as you create
it and you can adjust the layouts accordingly as you go on.
Once you’re finished with it, you can of course once again take it.
You can download it as an MP4 video with the music embedded or you can share it to different
social platforms.
Now I’m actually playing with using this and I’m marrying it with real video as teaser
videos for Facebook.
So there’s a lot of ways that you can apply it within Adobe Spark.
So essentially, Adobe Spark is a new social graphics creation tool from our friends at
Adobe that allow us to create a variety of different type of post graphics and a variety
of different slideshows, animated slideshows, as well as some webpages should we choose
but it brings Adobe’s incredible sense of design and typography to bare.
We can use their pre-built backgrounds and images or we can import our own backgrounds
and images.
They have a bunch of license-free music that we can incorporate should we choose to or
of course we can bring in our own as well.
Overall, I think Adobe Spark is well worth you spending a few minutes and exploring and
if you’re like me, it might end up being one of your new favorite social tools.
I hope you found our video today to be useful.
Now there are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel and secondly please subscribe to our newsletter.
That way you hear about any upcoming courses or events that we have here at DottoTech.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel.
We’re supported by the generosity of you folks at the crowdfunding site of Patreon.
I encourage you to drop by our Patreon page, have a look and discover what’s involved
in supporting DottoTech, and what perks can come back to you should you choose to become
one of our patrons.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!