Beginner Graphic Design in Adobe Express: A Flyer

1. Easily Design with Adobe Express: [MUSIC] Do you want to create content that looks professional, but you're not a designer? Or maybe you are one, but it's taking way too long to create graphics and templates and contents. Then Adobe Express is the perfect tool for you. My name is Kate Silver and I'm an Adobe Express ambassador and a top teacher on Skillshare. Today we're going to create a giveaway competition flyer using an existing quick and easy template in Adobe Express. We will be changing all the contents of this template, which I personally used for one of my Skillshare giveaway competitions. To introduce the launch of a new course, we're going to learn how to easily add and edit our backgrounds in Adobe Express. How to add filters like blurs and transparency. How to change the texts, the colors, and even how to change the icons by choosing some of the many cool icons that Adobe Express has to offer. Finally, we're going to learn how to export, duplicate, and save our artwork. I encourage you to create your own version of the giveaway template using your own colors and graphics and branding and post it in the project section here. Let's get started. 2. Opening Adobe Express Templates: Guys, are you ready to start creating an amazing graphic with Adobe Express, which is really awesome and it's great for people that aren't even designers and it's just so easy to design something that looks great and feels great. Let's go. Now, if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud membership, then you have access to this as well for free, and if you don't feel free to access the link that I've added below. Let's keep going. I'm just going to scroll down and show you a couple of cool things about Adobe Express. First of all, you have access to the most amazing templates because this is all up to Adobe Standard. Adobe is just the number one in anything creation and graphic design and video editing, so it's not surprising that the templates are as such as well. You would be able to browse all templates. Then if you scroll down, I love this, not a designer, not a problem, and even me as a designer, some days, I don't really feel like one. I don't feel very inspired. It's very gray in London or whatever or I am moody. It's just so easy to take one of these templates. Anyway enough talking and let's get to it. I'm going to go and click on Get Adobe Express free. This is where you would sign up to your account, sign up or sign in, whichever makes sense for you. This is the Adobe Express home, which is really cool and really simple, which I like. You can create a logo or a flyer or any of these. Then if I go to projects, this is where I can see all the projects that I've worked on. Hello me. But anyway, let's get to the chase. I would straight away go to search old templates and I would write a template that makes sense for me. Because I am looking to launch a competition, a giveaway competition for my Skillshare students to win one free year of Skillshare, I would just type giveaway, competition, and enter. It's stunning, Adobe Express will give me all these stunning templates that are really nice and honestly I think they're the best that there are out there. Now you can also filter the topics further. You can say, oh, I just want a giveaway. You can say, oh, let's do it just in pink because if you know me, I love pink. Making an ad, etc. You can also say, just show me the free stuff or the animated stuff. I personally love animated flyers. If you don't want any of these, you can just untick and there we go. You know what? I'm also going to add the word cosmic because I like cosmic stuff and I think it's cool and it's trendy at the moment, so let's see what that gives me. This is actually pretty practical for my personal competition because there's a few steps involved. This would be really easy to use. I can click on that and it's pretty basic but pretty cool. 3. Editing a Template: It's pretty basic in terms of design, but it's pretty useful and that's what I need. Now, I've already noticed that this is not the format that I need. I think this is more like story or a Pinterest format. I'm instantly going to go to Resize because I want to make it more for an Instagram post. Actually I can choose all the different formats that I would like to change it to, but let's see what it does if I select Instagram. Wow, that's cool. It automatically refitted everything, so it's exactly what I need. Awesome. Now, if you click on Templates, you still have the option to change your mind and pick another template, but I think I'm just going to go with this for now. If I go to Text, I can also add some text stuff, I can add some photos. Actually, I decided right now that maybe I'll add a photo as a background. Let's see if I add this. Click and drag. Maybe if I make it bigger. I click on Layer order here and click on this one so that it moves to the bottom, very similarly to Photoshop or InDesign, just cool. Now this is fun, but the image is a little bit too much. It overpowers the text, so I'm just going to add some filters. I can select Add to background and I can zoom in, which is cool or zoom out. I can rotate it, which is just also cool, but not really necessary. I can untake add to background and I can also make it more transparent if I want. Obviously, it's going to be more purple because the background initially was purple. I can also add a filter, but I can make it grayscale or multiply to make it more subtle. I can add an enhancement and as you can see, there's loads I can add to play with, but I actually don't want to use this because it's not really necessary for me. I do want to see what blur gives me because I think blurred images look quite good as a background. That was it. I can close this and I'm happy with my background. Now let's change everything else. I want to change the color of this already because it doesn't really go. I'm going to click on this. I'm going to click on the color and then I have my brand colors that, by the way, you can add, which aren't really my brand colors, but I added them from a previous project. I can also choose by eye of color. Let's say this. Let's see. Then I can click on that and add that same color, which is here. Then I'll do the same for the green, click on it. It already looks different. The only thing I want to change is instead of share this post on your story, I would like to change this to share a project in the project section. What I do is I click on this and instantly, I'll be able to edit the text over here. I'm going to type share a project on Skillshare. I'm not sure what happened there. Let's try again, on Skillshare. Let's say I want to make different variations of this project. I can click on Duplicate page. I can go two or one. I have two versions of this project if I make minor adjustments and I can compare them. 4. Text & Icons: I'm going to show you a couple more things that we can change. I want to change the content of the texts. Instead of, "Like this post from your account", I would like to say, "Follow", and then I want to write, "Kate Silver." That's me. Kate Silver on Skillshare. I want to change the text of the second part. Instead of "Tag", I would like to say, "Write a course review." I probably need to push it back into place, voila. If I just see that it's changed a bit, the letting, as we call it, the space between the lines. If I wanted to change the letter spacing because it went weird, I can select it and go over here to Spacing, and I need to make sure I go to Line spacing instead of Letter spacing, which is called letting in other Adobe softwares. Select this one and do the same. As you can see, there is more space between the lines. Just a little bit more. Let's select this one and do the same. Click on "Spacing." Add more spacing. Awesome. Now, this is all fun and great, but now the icons don't really match up. They don't make sense here. I'm going to go to Shapes and I'm going to see what Adobe Express has to offer. I'm going to click "Insert Shapes" and I'm going to type, "Follow", let's see what they suggest. Not bad. I think these make a lot more sense than thumbs up. Which one are we going to go for? This is where you can pick which one makes more sense to you. I guess I'm just going to select this one. Let's see. I'm just going to pop it in here and woo. I'm going to click and drag and what was cool is that it automatically chose one of the colors that I've used here. But that's not the color that I want. I want that fuchsia color. I'm going to click on that fuchsia color and I can either go to this eyedropper tool and click on this and copy this color or I can choose one of those. Just so you know, you can click on the arrows on your keyboard by the way, to move things around, which is nice. I'm just going to delete the thumbs-up because I no longer need it so press "Delete" and bye-bye. Now I can move this and now that makes more sense. Then I guess the final icon that needs to be changed is this one because it doesn't make sense anymore. I'm just going to go ahead to my shapes and I'm going to type, right, and see what Adobe Express has to offer. Any of those will do really. Even the first one, I quite like the first one. Let's pop it in here. Again, it gave me that color, but that's fine. We're going to change that. Going to resize it, direct from the corners in, click and drag to move it. As before, we're going to click on a color, click on the Eye dropper, click on this color, and bam, that's the color we want. Just going to move this a little bit and I'm going to select this tag icon and delete, goodbye. I'm going to move this here and just like that, I've edited, changed the colors, changed the background, changed the text content, changed the icons of an existing Adobe Express template and I've made it my own, which is awesome. There's so much more that are for free to play with all these options. I think it's awesome. 5. Saving & Exporting: [MUSIC] Now, in order to save it, to export it, you can go to downloads, and if you had multiple pages, by the way, you can select "All pages", or just "This Page" and Adobe Express will give you the option to save it as a PNG, which is great for clear backgrounds, or a JPEG, which is what we'll save it as a PDF, which is best for printing and for high-quality. I'm just going to go and click on "JPEG", select "Start Download", and it will appear in my downloads. I'm using a Mac by the way, so if you're using a PC, your downloads will be somewhere else and voila, my edited template. Well done, and I hope you had fun with this and that you edit your own templates, and stay tuned for more templates and more ideas for designing for non-designers and designers. And FYI, if you go to my projects, you'll see all your projects here. 6. Adobe Express vs. Other Adobe Apps: [MUSIC] If you're maybe asking yourself, Ms. Kate Silver, this tutorial is great and Adobe Express seems really cool. Why should I still use softwares like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign or other Adobe softwares if I can just use Adobe Express? It's easier. It's faster. Well, let me try to explain. Adobe Express is great for quickly editing templates for non-designers or for the uninspired or for people who are rushed for time. But when it comes to more professional graphics and contents, and mainly for creating anything from scratch, you're better off combining Adobe Express with all the other Adobe softwares. For instance, if you want to design a book, or a magazine, or a PDF, you would still need a software like Adobe InDesign. If, for instance, you need to dramatically edit images, you would still need a software like Adobe Photoshop. To design a logo and a detailed illustration or icons from scratch, you would still need a software like Adobe Illustrator. For animation and motion graphics, also designed from scratch, you would also still need a software like Adobe After Effects. Finally, just mentioning the ones that I personally use, for editing a professional video, you're also better off using a software like Adobe Premiere Pro. FYI, this specific video has been created and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. Basically, Adobe Express is like the baby mashup version of all of these Adobe apps combined. But just for dummies or for anyone who is rushed for time or feeling uninspired or scared of the blank page, I personally love Adobe Express and I'm going to keep using it alongside all the other Adobe Creative Suite apps that I already use. 7. What's Next?: Voila, it's as quick and easy as that. If you liked this tutorial and you would like to learn some more in-depth graphic design, then check out my other courses that I teach; Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. Follow me for more updates on anything Adobe or graphic design. See you soon.