*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Alex Lazaris, and I am so excited to be back with another Adobe Express stream.
Today we're going to be focusing on making a cupcake brand. I am very, very excited about it. I love sweet things.
I know you do as well. And tomorrow we're going to be working on birthday invites. So we're going to be doing lots of fun, sweet things over the next few days.
But I'm super excited. I see a bunch of friends in here. Cody, Oliver, Alessandra, Steve, Nadia.
How are you all doing? Steve is already telling me to bust out the Comic Papyrus, but we haven't even got it started yet. But maybe bring up my Comic Papyrus trademark straight into this. Maybe later today.
How are you doing, Annika? Oh, no. Where do you go to plant go? All right, perfect. Cody says, I don't think I've seen Alex without a hat on.
I'm trying a new thing. I've got a beard. I've got hair now.
Who would have known? All right, so today, if you haven't used Express before, come on over my screen. Express is essentially the best way to get all your content out. So today is the day.
Modern technology. You're constantly needing to post on social media Express helps you get this done, but you can also build brands in it. You can build collateral in it.
You can do anything you want. You can build PDFs and brochures and flyers, whatever you need to do. But Express is amazing because you can start with all these great templates.
So if you scroll down this page, you get some really good starting points. Maybe you just need to post something really quick. But if you want to make your own brand, that's also acceptable.
You can start with the template here. Maybe I see this and I go, oh, I want to make a vegan hot dog. You can just click that one stop shop, boom, boom, boom.
It loads in the asset for you, and you can start to play with it. So today I'm going to show you all the tips and tricks that I have with using Express. But we're going to be making a cupcake brand and not vegan hot dogs.
If we want vegan hot dogs, maybe we'll do another stream. But really quickly, off the bat, you have this template here, but you can also just go to your homepage. We actually just start one straight off.
Go to the homepage. You have all your toolbars on the left. You also have toolbars on the right on whenever you're in the project, but really high level, what you can do within Express.
I know I talked about posting to your content online. You can schedule out content in Express. Also.
The best thing is Express is completely free for you. It does get better with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription because you can get more assets and things like that, but completely free use it to your advantage. You can schedule it to your Twitter, your Instagrams, your Facebooks, your Pinterest, and your LinkedIn.
All super, super helpful when you're trying to get that content calendar going and filled out. Super helpful. You can also upload assets to your libraries.
I'll show you that in a bit at the end of the stream, also with your brands. But let's say you're just starting from scratch. You can quickly resize stuff on your toolbar.
Here we've got this tray with shortcuts within Express. So you can remove backgrounds from your images, resize them, make them a GIF if you want, or even a video. You can also trim those down, resize those videos, merge them, and change speed.
So you have kind of the best of all the Adobe platforms all in one really simple tool. You can also do this all on your phone as well. So it's super helpful.
No matter where you are, whether you're on set or location, you need to do a quick little post. You can use Express to help get it done very quick. So today we're going to be focusing on building a brand within Express.
We can do it a couple different ways. We'll start off with one way, which is just by creating a logo, and we can just say, okay, cool. I can start off by typing in cupcake, and I can pull from this template.
So let's say maybe I like this one, which is kind of the guess you would say, like the wrapper for the cupcake, which is always fun to separate from. You can click this, click into it, double click into your asset, and you can change the type. So we'll say this is Annika's cupcakes, and then I don't like this typeface.
I don't think Annika likes it either. So maybe I'm going to just adjust this to be hand drawn. That's super easy.
We have recommendations on the side. If we want, we can click it and it'll change it up. Can also do this kind of like more hand drawn brush textured.
Or if we wanted to, we can also go into our font section on the right side of our screen and to go in and manually choose it. If you've already uploaded your brand into the library section or your brand section, it will give you the option of pulling that type directly from there. We haven't done that yet, but I'll show you in a bit.
So smoothly. Sanded seems fine, but what I don't like is maybe the line height on this. So what I'm going to do is actually go down to this VA and I'm going to change the line spacing and get the cupcakes closer so it feels a little bit more intentional and a little bit more part of her brand.
Sean says, great colors. That's awesome. Thank you, Sean.
But we're going to change the colors because we already started from a template. Annika, it's your show. What colors do you want? Maybe we can go in here.
So if you look at your cupcakes, this type at the bottom isn't really what I need for the logo. So I'm actually just going to remove it. I'm going to actually ungroup this.
So if you're looking at this and you're like, I don't understand what this square is doing for me, I'm going to ungroup this group, and I'm going to just edit the type as I want if I want to. I can play with things. Annika says purple.
So I'm going to ungroup this as click in, go fill, and then start to change the purple background. So kind of like that purple feels kind of vibrant, very poppy. I can also just mess with individual elements of it if I want to.
But instead oh, let's see here. Floral decorations. We got floral in the background.
I can also change it. So if I wanted to do, like, maybe a dual tone on this image, I can go to filters, and I can change the filter. So I can change it to duotone and drop in my purple if I want to.
Let me remove the extra hash mark. If we want to, we can also go in and maybe say, okay, we got purple. I know that this is breaking stuff.
If I say that I want to do, like, a yellow in the background there, that could be a little bit confusing for the design, potentially. I got that one, got this one. Now I can click this, and then I'll do the same thing.
Boom. POW. Criminal who must be put away.
And then I'm going to realign these two by clicking the background, two flower images that we have. And then I'm going to click the align vertical and align horizontal. And now they're set.
And now I'm going to just pull it back down so I can group these two images together, and I'm going to click into the circle and then group sorry, not group again. I'm going to align them vertically and horizontally again. So now you see the two shapes kind of come back together and create that kind of cupcake ring.
And then I'm going to group all three, the circle and the two flowers together. And now I've got one tight image that I can always mess with, and then I can just align to the vertical and horizontal space for the type. So that's a really simple way of kind of building your own custom logo within this.
The other really great thing within Express is that when I download this, I can also download this as a PDF, and I can take this into Illustrator. So if I wanted to make a vector file or needed it for other designers so maybe you're a business owner, and you're just starting to make your own cupcakes, but you needed to work with an agency or a designer to help you get something out the door. You can download this PDF.
It will be a vector, and that will be super helpful for you. Let's see if we got Comic Papyrus installed on my no, it's not installed. I'll have to upload it again for tomorrow's stream.
But. We'll get papyrus. We'll just do comic sands.
That's an Annika's favorite anyways. Boom. Perfect.
She's a classic comic. Sands Gal. I'm going to just loosen up a little bit of the line spacing here, and that feels a little bit more legible and cohesive.
Boom. Perfect. What I like about using Comic Sands with the silhouette that we have here is that it allows us to play off the roundedness of the kind of cupcake wrapper.
So that's fine. That's great. Annika says, oh, no, all caps, which means she loves it.
If your client says, oh, no, when you deliver the file to them, they absolutely love it. No changes, no notes. Perfection.
Etiquette says, I do like Onotypeco, though. Onotypeco is amazing. If you aren't familiar, Onotypeco has a bunch of really great fonts available for you to use through your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
So what we're going to do is actually start over. We're going to make another one of these beautiful cupcake logos. Show you how quickly you can be from just another template.
We're going to go down to Logo. Let's start with the logo size, and then I'm going to type in Cupcakes. Again, cupcake.
Boom. Template. So I really like the type on this a lot.
This is one of my favorite cupcake logos that we have available on the templates. I think it's beautiful. It's honestly so good that I think I want to see a real brand with this.
So please use this. Show us. Tag me on it.
I want to see what you've made with this, with the template. Very excited about it. First off, I don't like the green.
I want probably like a baby blue or like a lighter blue. Let's see here. Let's just play with the blues a little bit.
Like a light blue. Perfect. And then I'm going to go in here.
And if I wanted to, I could change out this person. So maybe this person is I'm just going to click replace. So I've got this silhouette.
We're doing a cupcake business. It doesn't make sense to have somebody holding a cake when it's only cupcakes. So I'm going to just type in Cupcakes or Cupcake into the shapes panel, and that will give me options to pull from.
Look at all these great vectors that we have to choose from. You can scroll for days. It's amazing.
If you don't see the crown on any of these assets, it means it's free to use. I'm just going to click that. Boom.
POW. Perfect. I also like that this cupcake kind of reinforces the half circle above and behind the mark itself, so it seems really clean and crisp.
Cakes and bakes. Great rhyme scheme. To that.
I love that. But actually, since we're just a cupcake business, do cupcakes, and maybe we adjust this so that the type is a little bit smaller, start to run into some of the visual issues with having this arch be a different kind of cadence for this cupcakes right here. So I'm just trying to balance that out a little bit.
Boom. Campbell's sean says the Noun project is great. The noun project is great.
If you're not familiar with that, you can also download vectors from there or get SVGs and apps files for icons and iconography and make sure that you license them correctly and give Attribution and everything for that as well, if you are licensing it that way. All right, let's see here. Annika's.
Annika's cupcakes. What do we want to call this? Annika's? Or do we want to give Sean one now? Sean's Place. We'll do two capitals, one for the S and one for the P.
Sean's Place. And we're going to adjust the horizontal spacing of this type so that we can fit it all into one word. Sean's place is here.
Just aligning. Whenever you're aligning objects, you can see that there's a blue line that sometimes pops up in the middle of your screen. It might be a little bit hard to see on the blue background, but if the blue line is there, it means you're aligning to an object.
If you see the pink line in the middle of your screen, that means that you are aligning to the center of the artboard. So I just want to do that real quick. Eventually, I'm going to also just make sure everything else is snapped to the center of the artboard.
So I got the background there. Going to snap the cupcake. I'm going to actually yeah, that's good.
I'm going to take Sean's place up. Cody says Annika got edged out by Sean's cupcake business. That's true.
So funny. I love that we have a little competition happening in Chat for who has the best cupcake business. It's amazing.
All right. Sean's Place. From an optical alignment perspective, I might want to find a better word to pair with Sean's Place, because it feels a little off center and wonky.
But that's a very specific me problem and not probably a you problem. So that's optically just driving me crazy right now. All right.
It's fine. Everything's great. We're going to play with this cupcake, going to adjust it.
I think I might just want to shrink down the background border a tiny bit just so we can play that off a little bit more and just push it around. Boom. Actually, I'm just going to undo that.
It was fine. It was fine earlier. All right.
So now we've got this. If we want to oh, I need to adjust these colors now. So I'm going to adjust these colors very quickly.
Start to pull in darker blues just to keep it a little bit more monochromatic. Got this color. It's actually quite nice.
On the blue background, we're going to do border fill. Just quickly grab it from your current palette. Up here, you'll see there's a quick selection for your brand that you've already put into Express.
This is a client project that I originally had that was one of the default brands. I'll show you now after we get all the colors swapped, how to bring it in, make it your default color palette and what that will do for your business and your brand on through Express. So we got this image.
Let's change that to that blue. Very nice. I'm also thinking I might want to change this beige to make it a little bit more pink.
I know it's already kind of got some pink tones on it. See if I can yeah, it feels a little bit more red in there. Quite nice.
Adjust that. And then I'm going to go to this type. So this type right here, there's a shadow on it.
We're going to adjust that shadow color to make it that blue. We've also got a stroke on it. The outline here, I'm going to just adjust that really quickly.
What you can do with this is you can adjust the angle and the depth of the shadow. So right now it's at 135 and 34. We can also change it so you can see how just by me rotating it, just by me taking the slider, rotates the shadow like the sun would be kind of circling around you.
That drop shadow changes as well. Let's do it back to something like that. 154 now.
And then you can change the depth. So I kind of want to play off a little bit extra depth with it. I'm going to adjust the angle and see if I can fill in some of the what I'm trying to do is leverage the drop shadow to kind of contrast some of the weighting because Sean's is longer than place, the two words.
I'm using the width of the shadow to kind of help offset the horizontal width of the logo already. I'm just going to lower that drop shadow just a tiny bit and perfection. All right, great.
So then I'm going to just adjust the copy here. We've got a Los Angeles on two lines. Click change.
Perfect. We got this here as well. Cool.
So that's really simple. Now what we can do is just download it. We can download it as a PNG, PNG with a transparent background, JPEGs, and PDFs.
What we're going to do is actually download it as a PNG with a transparent background. I see what's happening in Chat. All right, I see it.
You all are hilarious. All right, perfect. We're going to go into the brand section.
We can also download this as just like a JPEG, just as an option later on if we want to. Let's just do that just for giggles. All right.
And what we're going to do is we're going to go to our home page again. Now that you see I've got my project PNG, I'm going to go to brands, and now I'm going to go create a brand. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to upload my logo.
You just saw me download these things. Just really quickly grab it. Boom.
Perfect. So now you'll see, it automatically starts to show you a preview of what your logo could look like in these sections right here. Just little logo lockups, bomb, bomb, bomb.
We know that you probably want responsive logo. So what I'll show you in a second is how you can make different iterations of that really quickly to kind of scale out your business. But I wanted to quickly just pick your colors.
Hello. All right, pick your colors. Got logo color, boom.
Save that's the blue. And then I've got my fonts. And we can kind of go into that as well.
But I'm going to just go. So we've got our fonts here. We can choose, let's say like vintage Bold.
Just to start. This won't be what we're officially going to use for the brand, but we'll start with it. Sean's Place is the name of this project.
So we're just going to do that. Create my brand. Bada bing, bada boom.
Now it's just loading it in. It's going to save it for us. And then we're going to go in.
So if you want to, we could add more colors. We can also add more fonts if you want to upload your own font. So maybe like comic papyrus.
Let me see if I can do that really quickly. If it takes longer time, then I'm not going to do it. Cool.
Taking too long. So we'll save that for tomorrow. But you can add in your own custom fonts, all that good stuff.
You can also add more colors. So if I want like a secondary typeface or a color scheme, I can pull that in directly here. I can also go back to my file, find that pink, plot it in, but you can also upload more logos.
So I'll show you how to create some more logos really quickly with what we just made. And then we can start to incorporate this into your brand book. What you're going to want to do is go to the brand section and you're going to want to click on this triple dot right there.
And then click make default. Right now my client project is the star on the corner. That means that it's the default one.
What I want to do is click that star. Now make it default. And you'll see it has now replaced the other projects in my Express library.
And you'll want to use that. Boom. Let's go straight into this.
So now we can go back to our project. Let's go here. Projects.
Edit project for Sean's place. Sean's place. Boom.
That's what we finally named it. You can name it on the top left of your screen. Just type it in there.
What you can also do is duplicate this entire artboard. Now sorry, duplicate page. So we'll click duplicate page.
And what we're going to do is give ourselves additional options for this logo. So I'm going to ungroup the entire thing and I'm going to remove the background and the copy so that I can make a responsive logo. Responsive logos or brand kits are super helpful these days, especially when you're ever you're working on social media, you know how small those avatar logos and things like that are.
So we want to just always be able to scale the business's name down really easily if we want to. With this type that we already have selected. We can also do a circular logo, though it does make this one look pretty wonky.
So I don't want to do that. Maybe we'll see what no, it looks like it's removing the drop shadow whenever I do that. Let's see if I can add it back.
Add the drop shadow back. It's kind of there, but it makes it all italicsy, which is really strange. So we're not going to do that because it loses some of the script.
Awesomeness. But what we can do here really quickly is we can scale up this logo and make it bigger and center it. And we can play with it that way.
So now we have like a centered logo if we need it. We can also, again, go back to the line spacing and bring it closer if we want to. We can also separate the two if we want.
So I can take out, like, place. And what I'll do here is go down to I'm going to go up here to the top right where it says duplicate and duplicate it and just drag this down and then change this to Place. That gives us another option for like an additional logo option for us.
Trying to keep them a little bit close together. Cool. So it feels pretty good there.
I'm going to group these together. And then I'm just going to center it in the artboard and then vertically center it as well. And then from here, I can just do the same thing and click download as a PNG.
Start download. I can go back into our logos and then add it right in right here. Sean's place.
Boom. So now we have additional logos in our brand kit, which is super helpful. And then whenever we're wanting to, like, maybe we need to just do a quick template.
Let's say we're going to add a new page, new story. So maybe it just needs to be an Instagram story. Yeah, let's do an Instagram story really quickly.
I know we have like three minutes left. So go to templates and then do cupcake. See if there's any great cupcake pieces here.
Oh, cool. So what we can do is grab this, take Summer cupcakes in, click it once, replace page. Perfect.
Replace this page. And what I'm going to do is actually click into the design button here. And then this is going to give me the Magic Design tool button.
It's pretty cool. You click Shuffle, and it should bring in your brand into this aesthetic already. So if you've already got kind of a template, it will kind of go through what it thinks is a good option for you with your color palette.
It does do kind of secondary and tertiary colors. So this is taking inspiration from our blues. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you don't because this isn't the full color value.
So if you have a very defined brand system that you're working with, maybe you're working with a client or something like that, you will want to make sure that you're using the correct color. So instead what I'll do here is just go back to our default blue. I don't mind it so much on the background here.
If we had a custom type or if we had a typeface that we prefer, that's also an option. You also get these great font recommendations in the bottom corner. You can also click Explore More, and it'll pull more of these pieces in there.
Maybe I want to really play into the summer vibes and maybe do something a little bit lighter and just span the top of this piece. And then this kind of looks like a poop emoji the way that it was cropped. So I don't really want that for my cupcake business.
So I'm just going to click again. Cupcakes, cupcake, cupcake and shapes. I'm going to pull in our little vector one that we already had.
I'm just going to kind of plop it in the corner. We've already got our logo also right here. I don't know if you noticed that earlier.
So we got our full logo in the corner. We can place maybe I actually don't need a vector image back there. I'm just going to take a shape and just do like, rectangle.
I'm just going to pull this in and I'm going to pull it across the bottom of our image and then pull in maybe our like we had a pink in our logo. Pull that in and bang. So now we got this pink background.
You're like, okay, Alex, this is cool and everything, but now it's underneath the layers. So what you can do is just quickly pull it underneath on the layer section on the bottom right of your screen. And then you can adjust your copy and then just plop your logo, say when your store is open and everything, and you'll just be right there.
So now we're at time, but thank you all for hanging out with me. Tomorrow we're going to be working on birthday invites and flyers, and we'll probably pull in a little bit of sponsor section from Sean's place. Very excited to hang out with you all again tomorrow.
Thank you all for hanging out. We'll see you all shortly. Bye.
