Creating a Graphic in Adobe Spark
Lesson 2 from: Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts In a SnapKhara Plicanic
Creating a Graphic in Adobe Spark
Lesson 2 from: Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts In a SnapKhara Plicanic
Lessons
Lesson Info
Creating a Graphic in Adobe Spark
We're gonna jump right in now over to Adobe Spark. So the url spark.adobe.com and this is what you see once you're logged in with your Adobe ID. So I went through and actually deleted all my Spark so we would have a nice, blank canvas. So this is really what it looks like once you get logged in and you're totally new to this. So as I mentioned, there's three different types of stories, the posts, the video and the pages so we're gonna just start by pretending we don't know, we don't have a brand even, we don't know what's going on, we're just gonna dig right in. So I'm gonna come up here and click this little plus to make something new. And right away, it shows us all kinds of ideas. So we can start with any of these. You can think of them like templates and what's cool is you can see too some ideas about different ways people use it. So yes we can make social graphics but oh look, what's a photo journal and if I hover over it, I see oh this is a web page so this is using the page form...
at to create a photo journal or the slide show is with the video. Maybe you're creating a wedding invitation. You can do that as well with Spark. You don't even have to open Photoshop or know how to use Photoshop, you just create a graphic which is that post format. So we'll just kind of look through here and see what we might want to start with. I'm gonna scroll down and Etsy covers, promo videos, you basically want to look through here and just see what suits loosely what you have in mind. So if we want to just make a little graphic, let's just start with this. So it's a graphic, so it's gonna be a post and here it's an Instagram ad but I'm just gonna click on it and Spark will prep it for me so that I can start editing it. So what's really cool too is even if you don't have your own images to use, you can get access to their free stuff from directly within Adobe Spark. So let's say we're gonna create this to say let's get our Spark on because that's what we're about to do. So if I want to edit this text, I'm just gonna click to select it, you see that puts a box around it here. And if I want to change the type that's in here, I'm gonna double click to open the little type editor and we'll type, I'll turn my caps lock on, let's get our Spark on, exclamation point. And what I really find liberating as a designer, as someone who spends a lot of time in Photoshop, in Illustrator and Design all of that, is I'm looking at this right now and if I was in one of those other programs, I'd be like okay I need to break my lines, I need to worry about line breaks and all of that and when you're working here in Spark, you just don't, it's so cool. So I don't care where the line break happens here 'cause it doesn't matter, Spark's gonna figure it all out so I'm just gonna click done and look at that. It deals with it and I don't have to. I just, I can't tell you what just a relief that is. So okay we've gotten our Spark on, we've changed this text, we also have this type box down here so I'm gonna click to select that. Double click to enter into the type box and let's be like PS it's free. Done. Okay. So that's looking pretty good. We'll talk about styling the text in a minute. For now, let's pop over to the graphic that's in the background. So I'm gonna click to select the photo and you'll notice that I get some options here to adjust the scale of the photo, I can apply different filters to the photo. In this case, if I double click the photo, it's gonna prompt me to give it a new source. So since we're talking about sparks, let's choose find free photos and let's just see, I'll type spark into the box and look what I get. Images, these are from Unsplash and Pixabay where I can now use these for free and they're beautiful. So we'll just pick one. What might look great? This. So I just click it, just click to select it and it automatically shows here. I can apply a filter to it if I want to now that I've added it. Different effects. Maybe I want a different one so I'll double click again to get back to this library and you'll notice I don't even have to type and re-search for spark, it just remembers. Oh I kind of like this. So we'll choose this. Do I want to give it a treatment? I can't really tell it's a spark if I make it black and white. So maybe we'll make it this matte, maybe I'll scale it up so the spark takes more of the space here. Okay so we're gettin' somewhere. Let's go back to our text. It's kind of hard to read on this right now 'cause it's dark and it's on a dark background. So I can click to select the text. I can change the fonts here, I can change the alignment, I can tell it to capitalize everything. I typed it with my caps lock on so that's already happening but I can adjust size and spacing and all of this but I can also come here. So these menus are dynamic so whatever you click on, they're responsive. If I click on the image, I get choices relating to the image so if I'm clicked on the text here, I get some text editing controls right here but I can also go down here and click this type, oh excuse me, color, these are the type settings. If want to change the color, I can click down here and what I love is that it gives you pairs of things. So you don't have to start from scratch and be like wow, what should I use? You can just start clicking on stuff and ooh, I like that, and they just apply it. And if I don't like it, I can click this right here to be really specific about what colors I want. I can type in hex codes for my colors if I know 'em. But honestly, you don't even have to work this hard so I'll cancel that. You can just click, they give you so many good suggestions that I find myself just going with a lot of them and that's one of the time savers. Another neat feature that I like is this shuffle option so if I want to flip these colors around, I can hit shuffle and it flip flops them so I don't have to worry about which is the front color and which is the back. So that's pretty cool and also, that's color, we can also click down here to affect the shape. So we can put our text on top of circles or any other number of different shapes, we can add horizontal rules or my personal favorite is this one, which just blocks out behind the text. Oops. If we make a mistake and we don't like anything, we can click this undo button. Looks like it got a little bit stuck. So we'll come back to that in a minute. I also want to show these effects, we can add outlines to our type, we can do cutout type, all these different kinds of settings but my personal favorite is this style option here because you can grab this wheel and this is what I was talking about with Kenna yesterday. You can just totally change up your type and some of it you're like oh that doesn't really fit my brand or my style but you just keep going around and sometimes you find really fun combinations that you would never have made and so I'm just dragging this around the circle and it's just trying out all these different, ooh I like that one, you see? You just never really know, it's sort of like a wild card but it's intelligent. And so it's just gonna go through and apply those effects so maybe I click down on this one and try the same thing, roll, ooh I like too. If I want to scale any of this up, I can also just click and drag and I don't have to worry about adjusting line breaks and letting and kerning and all of that, I just drag and Spark figures it out and I don't have to. And anytime that I can have a break from figuring that stuff all out, I'm happy about it. There we go. So if I want to center align this, I can just select it and then go back to these type attributes and here's where I have my paragraph alignments. So you'll notice here if I'm trying to align everything to center, you see these guides that pop up, they help you align stuff so even if you are really not a designer and you're like I just don't know how this works, this really turns anyone into a designer and it's so easy. Down here is where you can click and choose a different size. So we started with an Instagram size but I mean just to show you how easy it is, you can come down here say well what about like for a blog post? And it might take a minute to render. Or a Pinterest. There we go. It looks like it's taking a minute to render. But you can change the size very easily by clicking over here and choosing a size. And again, if you don't like something, you can undo it pretty easily. There we are, now we have our Pinterest, our Pinterest size. So let's go back to Instagram for now. There's something just comforting about a square I think. Let's get our Spark on. And once we're happy with it, this is, I'm just waiting for it to kind of snap into render here. Sometimes it might take a moment. When we're happy with it, we can download it over here. So we click the download button and I love that, it just, boom, downloads so we don't have to worry about what format am I gonna get this in, it's just gonna be a jpeg and if we go back, where is this saved then? If we click right here on the little Spark icon, we see that we didn't even have to save it, it just automatically saved it for us and that is great, it almost saves things too well because sometimes I'm just screwing around and then it makes posts for everything I was just screwing around with. So this is where it will live, so this is what I sort of call my home base and I can get here at any time by just clicking the logo in the top left corner and this is where all your Sparks, all your different projects, this is where they live. So you can duplicate them, you can edit them, you can rename them. If I don't like this name of my post, 'cause that's not very descriptive, we'll say get our spark on. There we are. If we need to go back in and edit it for some reason, we can just click the little edit button and it opens up for us. There we are back to Instagram. Okay, so... I mean it's just endless fun. We'll call that good. And we'll go back to home base. So it's gonna save our edits and there it is.
Class Materials
Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts in a Snap - Adobe Stock Contributor Tutorial
Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts in a Snap - Course Files
Ratings and Reviews
Leah
Khara is an upbeat presenter with a fantastic overview of Spark that showed me just how useful this program will be for my business!