Lessons

Lesson Info

Branding in Adobe Spark

As I mentioned, one of the cool benefits to being a Creative Cloud subscriber is that you get to add your brand into this mix. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. You wanna come up here to add brand. And we'll upload a logo. So we'll click to do that and I'll navigate, whoa, where did I save all of that, to our Spark course files, and we'll have a chance in a minute to upload the black and white version, so for right now I'll just choose the primary logo. And here we can see that it uploaded. We'll click and you can see that it automatically selected colors from the logo, so I'll just choose like, sort of my main hero color for now and we'll add to this in a minute. We'll hit save. And now we can pick a font. So, I'm gonna go with this one right here but you can of course choose any number of things, and you can upload your own font if you prefer. So we've got all that in here, and now I'm just gonna click next. We'll give it a name. So this is our Party Panache, and now we're gonna ...

make brand magic. Now this might take a minute because it's generating tons of different templates. It's extracting the colors from our logo. It's building all of these things to save us time later, so, um, you know, you can take a breath at this point. Kenna, did they have questions at home? There was a question from Desiree that was, when you downloaded one of the JPEGs, can you change formats after you download? And I'm not sure if she meant the size of the graphic or format of the fonts, or what have you but-- That's a good question. After you download it. Yeah, so when you download it, you are just getting essentially a JPEG. So here we can see, here is my download folder and it's right here, My Post.jpg, that was before I gave it a name. So once you have that JPEG, you can do anything you want with it. If you wanna take it into Photoshop and repurpose it, you can. But also you can do all of that in Spark too and then just download it in different sizes. So if you, we'll do that when we get to our campaign here in a moment. But we'll take a post and put it in a bunch of different sizes. Yeah, good question. Alright, so now it's like, congratulations. We can make branded stories. So we can click let's go, or you can just close it. So, where are we now? Instead of being in our projects, we're now in our brand. So we've called the brand Party Panache. And here we have our logos and our colors and our fonts. So this stuff is editable all the time, anytime, which is pretty great. So let's do that. Let's click the logo right here. And here's our primary logo, but you know, sometimes in some of these posts, sometimes it might be helpful to have another version of our logo. So if I wanna do that I can just click the little plus, and then I have this asset seven here is a black and white version. So we'll just upload that too and then we can, you know, pick and choose as we're making different posts. For colors, if I click on colors, I'd like to add some more variety here. So what it does is it takes a color that we select during the brand making process, and then it sort of creates like a theme based on those colors. But I wanna have some more color. So I'm gonna click more, and you'll notice it's populating this with colors it thinks, it finds in the logo or something that goes well with that. So we'll click to add the yellow, so I'll save that, and then I'll click again and grab the blue, and these are just automatically generated from the logo. So I don't have to worry about, what's my RGB codes for my brand. It's just gonna pull it out of the logo. Same here with fonts. We have header fonts and then we have the body text. So if we wanna make changes here, we can do that. If we wanna upload a font to use, we can do that here. I'm just gonna leave that with what they suggest. Okay, so now we can close out of here. So we've added everything here. And then, if we scroll through this, we can see some templates that it has created for us. There's even more, so I'm gonna click see all so we can look. And we'll notice that they're already like applying our colors and our logo, and they're sort of pinkifying images and just filtering things in a way that might go nicely with what we have already started here. So if we scroll through here, we can look for what we might wanna use as a starting point for an image. So for this campaign that we're gonna make, we're gonna be creating that how to make the perfect cocktail post. So the first thing we wanna do is create imagery to promote the post so people can Pin it, they can, you know, we can have it on Instagram or Snapchat or wherever we wanna put it. So I'm just looking through here and, I mean you really have to have, keep a loose idea of these because you can totally customize any of this. So what I'm looking for when I look through here is I know I wanna have an image and I want some text. And I kinda like how this is organized. So I'll just create my post from this, as a starting point. So I'll click create from. Now it's gonna pull all this stuff up and I can start editing it. You see, it already pulls in our logo. So the Party Panache ladies are feeling good about that. And we've already got our colors and everything pretty well situated. So the first thing we'll do is edit this image, so I'll click to select it, and if I double click, I can choose a source for my files. So we saw earlier how we can use free photos, and I think we'll do some of that again later, so for right now I'll show you how to upload your own photo. Actually no, we'll do a free photo for this too. Wait a minute. Yeah, we'll upload, sorry. Forgot where we were going for a minute. Alright, so we're gonna upload our own file here, and I have this image, I believe it's this one, yes, this little dog. This is from Adobe stock. So um, this is included in your course files. So we'll click to select that and I'll hit choose. And now it's gonna upload that. So you can find your own free photos like we did earlier and we'll do again coming up shortly, or in this case we're gonna upload one. And it's applying the lighten filter to it. So we can keep that if we want, or we can choose none if we don't. I kinda like it, now that I look at this. Let's keep it. So, if I wanna change this at all, like, the layout of this, I can click here and drag down. And again, as a designer, I don't know, I feel like, on one hand, you're kinda like, I'm surrendering my designer control, obsession, to Spark, but at the same time, like, it's so liberating because I can just drag stuff and it all just shuffles around and I don't have to realign everything and it's just great. So, we can decide kinda how we wanna put this. Maybe like so. If I wanna scale the image, as long as I've got it selected, I can come over here and scale it, so that's kinda fun. I think that looks good for the image. So let's click to select the logo. I think maybe for this image it should be down here. You'll notice the little guides that pop up, so it's helping me align things nicely. This really cures people who don't know how to make beautiful things. This really helps. So, you know, you can also like learn a lot about design from the way that they sort of suggest things here, which is pretty cool. And this text box, I don't think we need for this, so I'm gonna select it and then hit the trashcan up here. So this is what we're gonna work with. So I'll double click. And we're gonna say, party animals welcome. There we go. And I can just scale from the corner to drag this up. So we're just creating a branded post here and then we'll make our cocktail one in a minute. And let's see. If we're like, I don't know what to do with this text, well, we can click over here to capitalize it. That goes a long way in sort of funktifying this. And then, my personal favorite, while we have the text selected, we can choose all these different attributes. So, you know, maybe we'll leave it pink for now. Maybe we wanna add this backing shape to it, so I'll click to select that. And let's go back up here to color. Now I'm not really diggin' the colors that it automatically generated here. So we can shuffle these around to just flip flop those, or you'll notice it's suggesting these pairings from the colors in our brand. So all I have to do is click this, and it's like, ta da. It picks those colors and it's just, like, done. Maybe I drag it up here. Maybe we wanna make it more like this. And we'll put our little logo in the corner. Maybe we wanna slap the logo right here. I mean, I'm lovin' that. Okay. So, if we wanna change the color of this area, we can just select that, and then we can fill it with something. I'm diggin' it with pink. That looks pretty good. So, then when we're happy with it, we hit download. So that's how easy it is to work from a branded template once you upload your template, then you can start with your brand already in place, which I think is pretty cool. Let's go back to our project. So I'm gonna click this, so now we have two. We have our party animal post. We'll click to rename it. And our get your spark on. So one other thing that's kinda neat. Maybe we're like, well maybe we wanna do some AB testing on our social posts, and maybe we wanna take the same concept but create a different artistic version of it. So we can click right here and just choose duplicate. And we'll call it party animal copy. Click okay. I do have to say they, when things are rendering they have really fun messages, like abracadabra, that pop up. So Adobe keeps you entertained if you have to wait for any rendering, which is appreciated. Alright, so then we'll click edit. So now we're gonna edit our copy here. And here is what I wanna show you. It's gonna load this up here, in a minute. There it is. And, so while we're with nothing selected, we can go through and look at different variations, okay? And these are basically just other styles we can apply to things. There's also layouts we could change. So maybe we want something with, like, multiple image blocks, etc. But for right now let's just go back to design. I just wanna show you how easy it is to take something that you've already created, and then just totally remix it, but also like, in your style. So for example, let's see what might make a good, let's see how it handles this. So if I click this, you'll notice it automatically puts the photo in the background and changes the type and everything, but then, if we get outta here, let's say, okay, well that's great but now it doesn't look like my brand because it's blue and I don't really have that blue, we can click brandify. Boom. That is so amazing. And if we don't like it then we're like, brandify again. And you can just keep brandifying and it's gonna like render it in all these different versions and variations, and you know, maybe we don't wanna cover the dog's face so we'll move that here. And we don't have to manually do any of this. And I just cannot stress how amazing it is to not have to worry about it. So, you know, if you're really a controlling person, you may have to let go of some of that, but I feel like it's so worth it, and for me I found it, when I can be a controlling, control freak a little bit, I found it very liberating. So I hope everyone else does as well. And again, when we're happy with it, we would just hit download and that's it. And again if we go back to our projects, we can see it right here. So now we could, you know, test these and see if one gets more engagement than another and all of that kind of fun stuff. But it was really easy to just take another design and then take what we've already created and it gets put into that design, and then you can just click and make it look like your brand. That's amazing. This is really cool technology.