Create a Digital Business Card with Adobe Express

1. Introduction: Are you ready to streamline your networking game with digital business cards that are always at your fingertips and never lost in the shuffle. Hi, I'm Tammy De Zilva a Service Designer behind my business Loopla and an Adobe Express Ambassador best in Brisbane, Australia. As a digital artist, I not only licensed my unique designs to businesses, but also create my own products that don, my designs. I'm passionate about sharing my expertise and experience through workshops, unlike classes, and connecting with the community. In this class, I'm going to introduce you to the world of digital business cards when networking meets the digital age. Fabulous and super simple way by using Adobe Express. Adobe Express is a one-stop solution for creating professional-looking graphics, videos and animations. With zero design experience required. Let's wave bye bye to paper business cards that end up crumbled in forgotten pockets are lost in the bottom of your bag. Digital business card is a tiny digital superstar where you can share contact information without much effort in a cost-effective and eco-friendly manner. Picture this. You're at a networking event and making connections. A potential client asks for your contact details. Instead of rummaging through your pockets, you work out your phone and show them your snazzy digital business card, which they can instantly download and have the information right at their fingertips. Maybe you find yourself at the school gate engaging in chat with another parent who happens to run a fascinating business. You both realize you want to stay in touch, but you've only got your phone with you. With the power of digital business cards, you can simply whip out your phone and instantly share your contact details. Making networking a breeze, even when you're caught off guard. Another great perk with digital business cards is that you can easily update your information with no cost involved. Let's also not forget the Eco-friendly aspect. By going digital, you're doing your part to save the trees. Normal wasting paper or contributing to the ever-growing mountain of discarded cards. As an extra treat in this class. I also have a special bonus where I show you how to create a file that can be downloaded to directly, import your contact details into the recipients phone. This eliminates manual data entry and create a seamless connection experience for everyone you meet. This class is suitable for beginners, whether you're an individual with no design experience, a budding entrepreneur taking your first steps into the business world, or a seasoned pro with an established business. Using Adobe Express, you can create a stunning card with ease, ready to help you make connections. All you need is your computer and a free Adobe Express account. Or if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you're already set! 2. Class Project: For the class project, I'm going to guide you through seven lessons that will take you through Adobe Express and how to create your very own digital business card, we will create two versions. One featuring a QR code for your phone and another containing your contact information, which will be linked by the QR code for easy download on the recipient's phone. The beauty of digital business cards is that you can design multiple versions of your business card tailored to suit different recipients needs. For instance, as an artist, you might want to include a link to your brand book and portfolio when sharing your card with an Art Director. Or you might like to have a separate version with your links to your wholesale catalog and order form for potential retailers. What's your digital business card is complete. Join me for Bonus lesson. We're all feel how to create a vCard file, making it really easy for people to input your contact details directly into their phone contacts. You can find a sample vCard file to download in the Resources section of the class, which I'll go through in their bonus lesson. I'll be using fictitious information throughout this class. For Jane Smith, I've included all the files and information that I use in the Resources section so you can follow along with me. I would love for you to share what you create in the project gallery, but please use the same or other fictitious information rather than your own to ensure the privacy of your contact information. If you don't have an Adobe Express account or an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, don't worry. Your first step now is to create a free account at adobe.com, forward slash express. Let's get started. 3. Adobe Express Overview: Let's dive into the world of Adobe Express with an extensive collection of templates, fonts, and design assets. It's so easy to get started quickly. You can also customize your creations with personal photos, videos, and text. Once you've protected you design, you can easily share it directly to social media, save it to computer, or export it in variety of formats. Projects are synced across the web and mobile apps so you can work on your designs anywhere. Adobe Express is accessible to everyone with a free plan available. I'll be using a premium plan for this class as I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. But I'll point out some of the differences as we go along. And they'll only use features that are available on the free plan to create a digital business card. When something is only available to premium users, you'll see the premium icon next to it. You can find out more about the differences between the two plans on the Adobe website. Let's get familiar with the interface before we dive into creating a digital business card. This is our homepage. Now at anytime, if you'd like to come back to it, simply click on the Home button and the left-hand side, or the Adobe Express icon in the top-left corner. Now I want to just briefly go through what's on our homepage. The homepage is set up to help you get started based on the type of output that you want to create. To get started, we can utilize this visual menu layout here. All we can click on the plus sign for more of a text-based menu. You can see the most popular content sizes are shown at the top, or you can scroll down to see the full list. You can also start by uploading your own media such as a PDF or photo. Next, we have quick actions. So quick actions and Adobe Express or tools that help you quickly and easily create your designs. There available for both images and videos. And they cover a wide range of tasks such as resizing, cropping and removing the background. Now, if you have a specific size that you know you want to create for your project. You can also go ahead and enter the custom size here. The next button we have is Your Stuff. So this is used to access all of your saved content. You're saved projects, templates and assets. We then have the Explore button. This is used to find inspiration and resources for your projects. So you can see you variety of different assets to search through for your project before you get started. Adobe Express comes with a wide variety of templates that you can use to get started. And these templates are really great way to learn the basics of design and to create professional-looking projects really quickly. We also have the option to create from scratch and not use a template. In this class, I'm going to go through using a template as well as creating from scratch for creating a digital business card. The next button we have is the schedule button, which is used to schedule the publishing of your designs to social media. If we click on Manage connections, you can connect to the various social media platforms and schedule to those two particular date and time that you want your designs to be published. We go back to our home. And finally the bottom you can see a list of the recent projects that you've created. Again, if you click those three dots there, there's a bunch of quick actions. Now, the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your branding 4. Branding: If you have a premium Adobe Express account, you can set up a brand profile within Adobe Express with your brand logo, colors, fonts, graphics, and templates. By defining these elements in one place, you can then easily apply them to your designs. When you use branding consistently across your marketing materials, it really helps to create a strong and memorable impression on your audience. Let's go to your stuff on the left-hand side. And then brands. Now if you have a free Adobe Express account, don't worry, as I'll show you how you can manually do it also in the next lesson. Now I'm going to walk you through how to set up a brand profile for the fictitious person Jane Smith. Of Jane Smith design. I've saved the brand graphics and information that I'm using in the Resources section for you to download and follow along. Okay, Let's go ahead and set up Jane Smith design brand. We will click create. Now I included two logos for you, a transparent logo and one with a cream background. Let's upload both. Okay, now let's add our colors. You can find the colors in the brand PDF in the Resources section. So our first color is the orange, D94C16. Second color. EC9C14, 357E57 1D3FVA. F58BH3, F8F1V9 Now, also in that brand guide, I have listed the fonts. Pacifico Regular. Open Sans Light, Open Sans Regular. I've also provided some graphics. We can select all of them at once. Now within Adobe Express, you can also create your own templates, which you can save as part of a brand as well. And there we have it. This is Jane Smith design brand ready for us to use to create our digital business card. In the next lesson, we're going to use a template to create our digital business card first 5. Using a Template: First, let's plan out what information we need to include on our digital business card. So we've got name, business name, title, phone number, email address, website, social media handles, logo, your photo, LinkedIn, any other links. There really is no limit to the information that you can add to your digital business card as long as you can find ways to edit neatly and that it's easily readable. Alright, let's go ahead and create our card. So we're going to search for templates that for a business card. Now because we're wanting it for a phone, we want it to be a vertical business card. Up the top here, we'll go to templates and search for vertical business card. Now, let's scroll through here and I'm going to pick this one. Don't worry if you don't find this same template. This lesson really is to show you how easy it is to use a Template to get familiar with the editor and the panels with all the options for the various elements that you use. So if you use a template that uses images instead of shapes, for example, you won't be able to change the colors in the same way. But I just want you to get familiar with the platform before we go into the next lesson in a little bit more detail. Now in our project view, you can see we've got re-size, theme, background, color, and align at the top here. This template wasn't created specifically for a phone. It was created to be a vertical printed business card. So we need to resize that to fit a better aspect ratio for a phone. Now, phone sizes vary quite a lot. So I'm actually going to pick Instagram story size, which is a 9 to 16 aspect ratio, and a great general size to pick. Instagram story. And then re-size. Now, I'm going to firstly color all of these shapes using our brand colors. As I click each shape or any elements in this project, you can see that the panel provides information for us to further customize each of these elements. If I go back to my shape, I can change the color. And because I created my brand profile earlier, I can easily click those colors here. If you're on the free plan, all you need to do is look at the brand guide for Jane Smith design. You can see the color guide there and you can type the hex code in manually. So I've got the orange. I'm just going to speed this up as I go through changing the colors for the rest of this card. Okay, now I need to change the shape behind these two half circles. And to get to that, it's going to be easiest to go to the Layers panel. This icon up here in the top right, toggles between showing my layers panel on an off. So if I scroll through here, I can find those two aqua blue and to cream shapes. And I can change them as well to match in with my brand colors. I'm also going to change my background color to be blue. And next I'm going to move these elements so they're right at the top of the business cards. If I hold down my mouse and select all of those, I can then hit the group button there. But I could also use shortcut key command G on a Mac or Control G on a PC. Now the shortcut keys that you can use in Adobe Express, I'm pretty similar to those that you can use in other Adobe products, such as Illustrator and Photoshop. So there is a list that you can refer to for Adobe Express shortcuts. I'll just pop a screenshot up for that now. And I'm now going to move that holding down the Shift key to keep it in alignment. Going to move that to the top of my business card. Alright, now I need to change the color of the text. I'm going to make that in cream. I'm going to change that To Jane Smith. I'm just going to move that up a little bit as well. So I can move that up here. And as you can see, as I'm moving that up, it's showing me the spacing so that I can align that nicely on my card. I have also got the align button at the top here, and I actually haven't got that quite in the center. I can click the align button to send to that for. I'm going to change the lettering into cream as well. And change that Surface Designer. Pop that under there. I want to move this block as well so that it lines up nicely with the edge of the J. I'll change that color to cream as well and update these details. Now I want to use the fonts that we have in our brand profile as well. I'm going to change Surface Designer to the Pacific or irregular. So you can also see above here we've got recommended fonts. If you want some other options to use here. Now, in this text panel, if you wanted to duplicate a text block, you can lock this element on the project so that it doesn't move around while you're doing other things. You can delete it and change the order of where it is in the Layers panel. You can also drag and drop elements on the Layers panel as well. Actually going to change that to my brand font, Sans Regular. And same for the contact details down below. At this point, we can add any further texts that we might want to include here, such as a phone number. Perhaps I would like to add my logo or a photo, but I'm pretty happy with how this is for a quick digital business card based on a template. In the next lesson, we're going to create a card from scratch rather than using a Template 6. Creating from Scratch: So we've seen how easy and quick it is to create a design using the templates in Adobe Express. In this lesson, we're going to create our digital business card from scratch. We're going to add this into our existing projects. So we'll click Add. We can click and add a page of the same size, a custom size, or duplicate the current page. I'm going to click same size. First, I'm going to pick my background color. I quite like that bright blue. Next, I'm going to add my logo. Now, We saved a logo in our design profile before. If we go to our brand, Jane Smith designs, you can see we have our logo, one with the cream background and one transparent. So I can select that and add it to my project. That way. If you're on the free plan, you can go to Media, Upload from device and pick your file. Let's move this to the top. If we wanted to rotate at all, we can click the rotate button there. We can re-size. Let's just move it over. And I'm now going to add a cream square behind our logo. So if I go elements, shapes, I'll click on a rectangle. Now, I want this rectangle to be a background behind there. I'm going to re-size that. I'm going to move the logo to be on top of the cream rectangle. Now, I also want to add a photo. Since this is for a fictitious design, I'm going to grab a photos from Adobe Stock. So I will go to media. We're just search for portrait. Just select this portrait. I click on that element. You can see the different options that I get for this image. I could crop it to fit into a certain shape. But I'm actually going to remove the background on it. We've got a nice cut out portrait. Line that up and make it a similar size to a logo. Those are both a little bit too big. I'm going to select both of those holding down the Shift key, and I can re-size them same time. Now, I've still got those two selected so I can move them around at the same time. You can see that those pink lines that are appearing to make sure that we're aligning it. You can see that it's aligned in the center without background cream rectangle, and it's also aligned to the center of our background. So to double-check, that is in the center, we can click on that cream rectangle and it's not quite in the center. We'll click Center. Think we're almost there. I think I might actually like to round out the corners on this cream rectangle. Let's move these elements around a little bit. So that there is a bit of space. I'm pretty happy with that. I need to add another cream rectangle for the contact information. This time I'm going to duplicate the one we already have selected, this cream rectangle. And I can click on the duplicate button here and then drag it down than just re-size that. Before I continue with that contact information, I'm actually going to group all of these three elements together. So I can click group on the side there. By grouping those elements, it just makes it easier for us if we want to move the block around later. Alright, back to our contact information. Now we need to add a text. Click on text. We can just add text or they're also a bunch of texts templates that you can use. You could search for text Template. Something fun. And you can click that and edit that in the same way that one's group It's got two elements. If I click on the individual element in that group, you can see that I can manipulate that still. But I'm actually wanting to use my brand fonts. So I'm just going to click on add your text. Jane Smith. Now, I'm going to click out of there and click that element again so it's selected. I'll change my color to blue. And I'm going to use our brand font. I've got easy access to that here from my brand profile, Pacifico regular. On the free profile, you could still access that just by typing it in here. Going to make that a little bit bigger. And just drag it. Next, I'm going to add my title. I don't want to use that specificofont. I want to use Open Sans Light and make that size 56. I want that to say Surface Designer. And I'll move that underneath. Now, I can duplicate that text. And I want to put my website in here. Janesmithdesign.com. That's not looking quite centered. Perhaps that cream rectangle that wasn't quite centered before. So let's align that up. That's looking better. Okay, what are the information shall I put on here? I will think I'll include email, phone number, and social media handle again, like we had on the previous card. I will duplicate that text, drag it down. Need to make that smaller so that it fits. Make that 43. Again, I'm going to duplicate that with the duplicate button. I put my phone number in this time, duplicate that again and type in my social media handle. Alright. So I'm going to group this bit of inflammation together. So I'll select each of those while holding down the Shift key, click Group. I'm just going to move that down. Now let's just make sure that these three items of text are aligned and distributed vertically in an even amount. That looks pretty good. Let's group those two bits. If contact information while I've got that selected group. And we've already done the top one. So in this example, I'm just showing you a general business card, but you could go ahead and add other information like I mentioned earlier, such as your portfolio link, link to your wholesale catalog, whatever it might be, your LinkedIn profile. Okay, now I'm going to add some graphic elements that are in our logo. We also saved those to our brand profile before. Go back to your stuff. And I've got the graphics here for those of you on the free plan in the same way that I went to media and could add the logo file. I can do the same for these graphic elements. Click on that, and that's going to add it to my project. Might add in a red dot. and I'm goign to re-size that so that it's quite as overwhelming. And perhaps I'll add that yellow one now. I want to rotate that around. I click on that element, you can see it, but I've also got the flip horizontal, flip vertical option here. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that and re-size it down. Just add that in here I'm actually going to move this a little bit further down. Business card I feel like maybe the background needs something else in there, so maybe we'll add some texture in there. Let's go into elements and design assets. Not try a horizontal line to fit in with the graphic elements in the logo. That first one's quite good at that in here. Now I need to to re-size that to fit. And of course, I want to move that to the back. Now, I don't like the black. I want to update the color of that. If I go to Effects, I can pick from the options in the presets. That Pink's quite funky, but I'm actually going to stick with my brand colors. So if I go to duotone, I'm going to set the highlights to the blue in our brand color. I'm going to make the shadows. I'll set it to the same blue. Then I want to go to custom and make it slightly lighter. Make this rectangle slightly wider. Feel like we need a little bit more space here. Maybe I'll make this block a little bit larger. You go on align that, center it. That's looking a bit better. I need to group all of these elements together and move this down. We'll go ahead and select all of these elements and group those together. Now we can easily move that whole block down together. I'm pretty happy with how this looks now. And we have our finished card that we've created from scratch. Any point if you wanted to go back and look at your version history, you can click on these three dots up here. You can also see that you can duplicate a file and save it as a Template. Creating a template can be really handy for creating your consistent brand style for things like social media posts. If for example, you always have your logo in a certain position for certain posts on social media, you can create a template that had this logo in the right position, ready to go to make things easier for you. Alright, in the next lesson, we'll talk about how to download and save the graphics that we've created 7. Downloading and Saving: Adobe Express automatically saves your work to the Cloud while you're working. It's a good idea to name our project and each page in the project so that when we download, it will have the correct name. If you don't rename it, it will download as untitled with the date and the time. Let's go ahead and update Our project's been renamed and click here to update our title Card from scratch. Okay, back to our first one. Card from template. In the top right-hand corner, we have the download button. You have the option to choose to download the selected page or all pages. In this case, I only want to download the selected page as I want to use this design instead. So I select the page and we didn't have a choice of PNG, JPEG or PDF. In this case, I'm going with PNG. A PNG file automatically saved in RGB color profile, which is a great profile when viewing on screen. So let's go ahead and click the Download button. That's finished downloading and is in my downloads folder. We then need to save are downloaded file to a Cloud storage solution such as Google Drive, dropbox, or on your website. Once saved, we need to share the file with rate access to anyone, and copy the link which we will use in the next lesson to create a QR code. I'm going to show you how I do that in Google Drive. Grab the file from my downloads. I'm using Google Chrome that's uploaded it in here. I'm going to share, Anyone with link. And I'll copy the link ready for the next lesson. Going back to Adobe Express, if you anticipate the possibility of further editing the graphic in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop. Consider downloading the file in PDF format. The PDF format preserves the graphic in vector format, enabling easy editing while keeping the layers intact. In the next lesson, we're going to generate a QR code using the link with just copied 8. Generating a QR Code: Now let's put that copied link to good use. In Adobe Express will generate a personalized QR code using the QR code generator. Quick action. To start, let's head back to our homepage. We'll click the Adobe Express icon in the top left. We'll scroll down to Quick Actions. Select, Generate QR code, and we'll paste are linked. You can customize the QR code to parents playing with its style, color, and even the file format to suit your preferences. I'm going to stick with the default black and white. And I'll then customize the colors further when I use the graphic in the next lesson. So let's click download to download the file. It's as easy as that. Next we'll create graphic for our QR code 9. Graphic for QR Code: Now that we've created the QR code for our digital business card, we need to create a graphic that we store in our phone with this QR code. I want this to have a similar look and feel to the business card that I created before. So I'm going back into that project. And I'm going to duplicate that page. We click on Add, duplicate. I'll rename this to be Card with QR. Now, I'm going to remove the contact details that we have here, and I'm going to replace it with the QR code that we just created. Go to my downloads and drag that file in. I could also go to Media Upload from device and picked up from my downloads folder as well. I'll resize this to fit. Center that on my screen. Now I want to make the color fit in with the brand color palette. Remembering that colors for our QR code needs to remain easily visible with high contrast to ensure that it can be easily scanned. Let's go ahead and go to effects. Under duotone will customize. For the shadows. I'm going to pick out blue. For the highlights. I'll pick the cream. And again now we'll download this page. We just need to send it to my phone now ready for scanning. The next lesson, we have a bonus where I'm going to show you how to create vCard file 10. Bonus: Creating a vCard File: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to create, export and use a vCard file, or also known as VCF, which stands for virtual contact file. It's a standard file format used to store and exchange contact information such as name, address, phone number, email address, and other relevant details. It allows users to share their contact information easily with others in an electronic format and has a file extension of VCF. When someone receives a vCard file that can import the contact information directly into their address book or contexts app. Which saves them the effort of manually entering the details. Vcard files provide a standardized and efficient way to share contact details across different platforms and devices, ensuring consistency and accuracy in contact information. Now from what we've done so far in this class, a vCard file is an alternative to creating a graphical digital business card, like we did back in lesson 5 and 6. The easiest way to create a vCard file is if you create a contact for yourself with all the information that you'd like to share. In Google contacts, you can do this. Apple contacts, even in Outlook contacts. Then you go ahead and export that contact information as a vCard file. I don't have Outlook to show you a screenshot, but you can do this via the import and export menu option. Alternatively, I've got a sample fictitious vCard file in the Resources section of this class, which you can download it, edit with your information. To find out more about the information that you put inside a vCard File. Take a look at the Wikipedia page that I've screenshot here for you. Once we have a vCard file ready, we will use this in the same way as we did for the graphic digital business card in lesson six, generate a new QR code as we learned in lesson eight, and update the graphic you created in lesson nine with this new QR code. When someone scans your QR code, this will then take them directly to your vCard File. Now we're linking to the file in Google Drive on an iPhone. It gives a message that it's an unsupported file type. So you need to be aware of the steps needed to open the file. The recipient needs to click the three dots in the top right. Select Open in, and then choose contacts. If contacts doesn't show, scroll to the right and click the three dots for more options and then select contacts. Then if I click Save in the top right. For Android phones, if you have multiple Google accounts, it will ask you which Google account to import the contact details to suggest opening it in the contacts app. If you'd like to offer both the graphical digital business card as well as the vCard file and let the recipient choose the format themselves. You could perhaps create a page on your website that has links to both. Instead. If you've created multiple versions of your digital business card so that you can send links appropriate to the contact. Be sure to also create multiple vCard files if you choose to go with this method to share your information and link them with QR codes 11. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you did it. You successfully created your very own digital business card, ready to share with people you meet. Remember to showcase your fabulous design in the project gallery. And don't forget to use fictitious information like I used in the lessons so that we can all admire your creativity without compromising your privacy. If you have any questions at all or you need further guidance, please don't hesitate to reach out in the discussion section. I'm here to help and support you Now before we wrap up, I would love if you could please leave a review for this class. Your feedback really helps me improve and it feels my passion to bring you more classes in the future. I would also love to stay connected. You can follow me on Skillshare to get the updates on my new classes. Follow me on social media or sign up to my newsletter to get tips and follow my creative adventures. Finally, don't forget to explore my other classes on Skillshare. Thanks again and I'll see you next time. 12. Need more?: Hey, friends, are you feeling stuck or need some fresh insights to tackle a challenge in your creative business? I'm offering one on one sessions through Skillshare. Why not join me for a focused call where we'll dive deep into your specific challenge. I have experience in art licensing, director customer sales, and wholesale, markets or craft fairs depending on where you're based, in person and online workshops and more. Or maybe you need technical assistance with creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. We'll work together to break down your challenge and brainstorm practical solutions tailored to your needs. No fluff, just actionable advise. To book in, you'll find the link below or head over to my profile page. I look forward to working with you soon.