*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another exciting Adobe Live stream.
I'm Alex Lazaris. I'm your host today and it's my birthday. I typically don't care about it, but today we're going to be making birthday invite and you all are welcome.
So we're going to be making some social stories, maybe a social post, maybe some flyers. We're going to be using Adobe Express the entire time to bring your birthday invites to life. So I'm super, super excited about this.
I see a bunch of birthday wishes coming through in Chat. Thank you, Paco. Thank you, Annika.
Thank you, Cody. Hello. Hello everyone.
I adore you all. Thank you for spending this time with me. I'm very excited.
We are going to be having a lot of fun. So if you don't know what Express is, adobe Express is kind of your streamlined do it all platform for getting content out the door so you can do quick little edits to your projects. If you look at this quick tray down here, you can remove backgrounds from your photos I showed you before on some of the Lord of Rings assets.
Removing and touching up stuff. We'll probably try a little bit of remove background today. Resize image convert to GIF, all these things.
If you want a little bit of animation to make your social project sparkle. Or maybe you need a newsletter for your emails. Maybe you're emailing some of your friends, say, come on over, it's my birthday.
We're going to Chuck E. Cheese's or we're going to play laser tag. Whatever you want to do, bring it on.
We're going to have a lot of fun with it. You can also export this as an MP4. The MP4 you can post on your social and get that conversion going with all the digital video stuff.
So that's super exciting. Hello, CJ. Hello Susan, Sean.
Hello. Yesterday, in case you missed it, we made a cupcake brand. Today we're going to be focusing on just birthday invites and flyers and things like that.
But if you are one of those people who loves to do maybe the new year's are coming up, maybe you want to send out holiday cards and things like that. You can do that. Or your birthday presents or birthday cards.
You can do that all through Adobe Express scheduling tool and you can post across all of your social media, whether that's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You can do it super duper fast through here. It's awesome for you as you're kind of touching up and sending out collateral to people.
We're going to go straight over back into the project. You're going to see it live, so we're going to go home. If you want, we can start from a template.
That's what we're going to start with today. The Instagram story is what I'm going to start with and I'm going to click the birthday. So in this top left corner, you'll see that we have this options.
You can start with any of these pieces that might be working for you. On the corner right here it says Inspirational Interactive Sales and Promotions. All these are great templates for you to start with.
You can also go up to the top left and type in things that are relevant to either project. So in the top you'll see the recents, I see birthday, cupcake, interior design, save the date, all these things I've had to use for either a client project or for Express streams in the past. And it's a great way to kind of let you choose a template that is relevant to what you're looking for.
So maybe you want to talk about Spot's birthday and Spot's your golden retriever, and you really want to play up the invite for your dog that's totally accessible and at your fingertips and you can do that immediately. I personally really resonate with this one coming over here. Alex Lazaris is going to be turning one.
Kaden is also turning one. Same age, same gray hairs. It's perfect.
Paco says spot. Yeah, Spot's birthday. All right, perfect.
So this is my starting file. If you look at it, you have a couple of things already happening. So as you go into this file right here, you'll start to see that when you click it, there's an ungroup button.
You can do that or you can keep it all grouped together and just snap to the vertical and horizontal spaces by making sure it's on the pink dots. But what I'm going to do is actually ungroup it because I want a little bit more control. And sometimes when it's all grouped together, you can't really click everything.
So Jack says, one of my dog's birthday was yesterday. Happy birthday to Jack's dog. Great scorpio birthday for your dog as well.
Sean says alex, check out Sean's place has been frozen. Something happened to it, man. What happened to your cupcake shot, Sean? Come on, man.
All right, so we're going to go in here. I'm going to click this. Obviously, this is not a photo of me.
This is Kaden. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually click replace if I want to. I can go over to the left side on this NAV bar and I can type in people and it'll give me a photo of a person.
If I press Enter, it's going to load in different options of people. So you could do this. Any stock image asset that you want is available at your fingertips.
If you look over on my left panel, you'll see that there's this crown icon that is happening. Let me see if I can zoom in on it. Yep.
So a little crown icon. That means that this is part of your Creative Cloud subscription and it is included if you are maybe a free user of Adobe Express. Because Adobe Express is completely free.
But it does get better with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Any asset without the crown is free for you to use. So we just plug this in.
But again, this is not me and I want it to be me. So we've got two different options. So what we've done here, this is a very tricky template, more master level for you.
If you've tuned into previous streams, there's some tips and tricks that we're doing here in order to get this image to the correct spot. And I'll show you what we're doing. So right here there's two images.
And there's one layer that's above. There's this layer that's above the actual crayon treatment and texture. We're going to actually mess with that real quick.
So what I'm going to do here, instead of choosing a stock photo of somebody else, I'm going to change it to my photo. I'm going to click replace. I'm going to click upload a photo and I'm just going to grab my headshot image and we're just going to pull that straight in.
And it's going to replace and transfer styles. And so automatically it's pulling in a masked background for us. Double click in there.
I can change the crop. I can adjust this to pull it down. Gives me a lot of different options to work with.
As you can see by it copy and pasting the same elements of it. We have this edit cutout. We can look in here.
This is the remove background tool. I'm going to show you what it looks like if we were to just kind of grab that asset and then pull it in. And then how to edit this background really quickly.
In case you're unfamiliar with this tool set, click the image and then click Remove Background on the top right of your screen. Boom. And then Adobe is going to predict what you want to take out of this background.
It's done a really great job with a black and white photo that has not really the highest contrast between the background and the foreground. It's done a really good job of masking out the textures, the pavement, everything from that. So pretty cool that it just can already sense that.
If we want to, we can adjust our brush size and we can go click Restore. So maybe I'm looking in on this photo here and I realize that part of my skateboard needs to be brought to the foreground and I want to add it back in. That's a quick option.
You can also start to refine it in there and just massage that in. Same kind of tips and tricks for your brush size. If you use your brackets just like you would in Photoshop, you can increase and decrease the size of your brush.
So that gives you even more control if you don't want to use the slider over here on the right. But honestly, I think it's done a great job cropping me out. I'm just going to leave that as it is.
And I'm just going to click check and it's going to save that for us. Boom. And it's doing a little thinking, I think.
See if we can do a refresh real quick reload. Cool. So that was just a demonstration of doing the remove background.
We just pull that out now that we have two. And then what I'm going to actually do is go to this layers panel here and you can see all the different layers in one. I'm going to go in and make sure that the background of this other piece is changed to me.
So I'm just going to double click that and then click the replace tool and then upload image and then upload the full background piece. So now you can see two different images. One I'm using for the background and one I'm trying to use for the texture to kind of mask it and create depth in this.
So what I'm going to do is go here, click the crop, and I'm going to pull down my head so it's not getting cropped completely. I'm just going to grab and pull straight down. Boom.
Very cool. Nice. So now we've got two images sitting straight on top of each other, one of which is yeah, looks pretty good.
Cool. So what we can do here is take that. You already see my head is on top of this yellow texture right here.
And I want to change this background color because I like blues. I'm going to use Sean's place blue. So if you saw yesterday oh my goodness.
Cody Petruk. How you doing? My buddy Cody. Awesome to see you in Chat, man.
Alex is turning one. Yep, that's me. We're doing one and done.
Boom. So now I'm going to adjust the size of this hat just to fit my head a little bit better. Want it to sit right there.
So you use the rotate tool that rotate icon right there just to get it to set Everett. So gently I'm going to adjust this. I can change this color of these kind of textures by just going in here really quickly.
And then maybe I can incorporate some more yellows or some more blues. I can also adjust this dual tone, make it completely blue. That's an option.
We just do all blue works. It's my birthday, I can do blue if I want. All right, Kaden is turning one.
That is not me. Alex is turning one and I'm going to turn this over and have some fun with it. So maybe I'll make this, I'll make the type white and then I'll make the outline of it.
The shape I will make blue. Maybe that's not enough contrast. There we go.
Something like that. This is probably one of the most Greek looking designs now and I appreciate it. All this blue and white happening on this page.
Cool. I'm going to adjust the line height here because the two rectangles of the bounding box of this shape are kind of creating this weird negative gap between the two lines. Just want them to kind of sit a little bit closer since they're already kind of they're close enough that I want them to feel special, and then maybe I'll do.
Alex is turning one. There you go. That seems better.
But now I'm like, oh, no, I'm zooming in here. I see this, like, whoa, I zoomed out. Too close.
Too close. General Kenobi says the colors reminded me of seinfeld as I needed a reminder. Yep, they definitely were seinfeld colors originally, and now we're just making them less seinfeld y.
I'm going to go in here and I'm going to adjust the crop, actually, because I don't want the skateboard going outside of the bounding box. So I'm just going to do that. And now we've got this beautiful kind of ability right there.
I'm going to take this because the crop on this ribbon is flat. I'm just going to put it towards the end of the bounding box right there so it looks like it's intentionally popping out kind of like a jack in the box at the bottom of this image. Looking at this, let's zoom to 100% by clicking the zoom at the top.
That's not bad. That's pretty sweet. That's like, honestly very quick.
But that's just your Instagram stories, right? So maybe you want to do, like, a swipe up for an invite link or something.
We're gonna have some fun with this. All right. Swipe up is what I'm going to do in this section.
Let's see what we got. By default, we've got this kind of we like this piece. It's a premium item because it's got the crown.
I'm going to just play with this. Maybe we'll push Alex's turning one up to the top. Maybe we just need to rotate it back to being flat.
Boom. Cool. Swipe up to C.
We'll start to change this up. We're going to bring this swipe up to C again, ungroup it, and we're going to make it more horizontal. I don't like how heavy vertically it is compared to the rest of the stuff, so I just want to mess with this a little bit.
Swipe up to C. Let's get it on one line. Cool.
I'm going to just adjust the background, play with the strokes. So right here you've got this outline. You have the ability to thicken it up or keep it really light and thin.
We want to have enough contrast from the background and the foreground that it's still legible. So what I'm going to do here is start messing with the do white. I feel like the white might not be enough, so maybe we need to go and make this.
Should we do white type. What do you think? Chat? No, white type is not the move. Cool.
Swipe up. So I'm going to make the background white. That feels very nice.
Boom. Swipe up to C. And then I'm going to take these little faces and move them around.
Maybe we'll adjust this. Boom. Make these little lurkers happening here, just kind of eyeballing the swipe up to C.
Maybe I need to adjust them a little bit. We'll do this. Swipe up to C.
Grab all three of these layers in our layer panel here. Going to drag them and then group and then shrink it down. Swipe up to C.
Which doesn't actually make sense now that I'm reading the copy. Swipe up to C. That's not what I need to do.
So what I'm actually going to do is double click in there and then swipe up to RSVP. So we want to make sure that we have enough tables at the birthday party because there's so many of you guys in Chat right now, I want to make sure everybody gets a piece of cake. So I'm going to just actually rotate this down, pull it in there, and then we can group this up if we want.
And then we can kind of snap it. So cool. Very, very simple.
You've already made an Instagram story. That's awesome. But now you're like, okay, Alex, that was cool.
What do we do about social posts? Well, you can do this where you can just go to duplicate page. And what you'll do is essentially create, like, another artboard. If you were working like, Illustrator or Photoshop, what it's done is duplicated this.
Now you have this ability in the bottom right of the screen to look at all your pages. And now what I can do here is quickly just resize this. So taking this, making it now a one by one instead of your nine by 16, and now it's a square.
Massive. So instead of having Alex's turning one like you would in, like, a story, I'm going to just make this the entire social post. I'm going to play up the size of it.
We have a lot of different options we can do. We can even uncrop this if we want to. But sometimes I think simplicity can be a great driver for effective social posts.
So what I'm doing here is just aligning vertically and horizontally, but there is a bounding box up top, and that bounding box is messing with our alignment. So we just want to make sure that we try to optically align in this space. General Kenobi says it's hip to be square.
That is so true. Cody asks, okay, Alex, that was cool. But what about social posts? Well, in a click of a button, you've already gotten social posts done.
So you've got one. So you've got already if we look at this, you've got a square, you've got your story. What else can we do? Well, we probably need to also think about maybe a flyer, right? So you just scroll through.
You click the resize button. Instead of just stopping at the social post section at the top, what you need to do is kind of go down to the bottom and scroll, scroll, scroll. You can go all the way in for all the formats.
And we're going to say, let's do, like, an A Four. So maybe something like that. And then great.
Maybe we need to figure out some copy. So let's do some copy. What do you guys think? Chat.
Let's add text. I forgot a brands really quickly. Let's make sure I can go to homepage really quick, go to Brands and let me see if I can mess with Sean's place.
And then add my add your fonts. All right. And I've got I found my comic papyrus earlier.
Let's see if I can do it again. I need to get my Comic Papyrus uploaded. Why? I literally had it working earlier.
This is unfortunate. All right, well, part of doing Adobe Live is that we're doing it live. So Comic Papyrus is not going to work for me right now.
It's big unfortunate. But that's okay. I'll just go back to our birthday.
We'll be having a sad candle instead. We'll go back to our projects. Let's see if maybe it's already in there and it's going to be nice to me again.
We'll go back to the artboard go double click to edit. What are you doing? Let's go back, resize this square one by one. It's because I didn't duplicate ha.
I made a mistake earlier. All right, let's just quickly redo this. 2 seconds.
Boom, POW. There we go. And then I'm going to duplicate this art page, and then I'm going to go to resize it, and then I'm going to go down to the A Four that we saw earlier.
Cool. Penny says correspondent load. Oh, no.
Yes. Bomber. I know you guys were all looking forward to Comic Papyrus.
Let's see here. Add your text, say laser tag, and let's see if we can adjust it. Let's see.
Comic Virus Come on. All right. Unfortunate.
All right, let's do Comic Sands, our holy backup. What? No fonts found for comic sands. Oh, no.
Papyrus. Adobe Fonts. No.
How do I design? All right, let's see here. I don't know how to design without those two. Let's see Gotham.
See if my Gotham's working. Nope. No Gotham.
All righty, let's do Ariel. Let's make sure Ariel's working. All right, great.
All right, let's just go with one of the font recommendations. If you look at the bottom right of your screen, you can see that there's font recommendations that you can use. Laser tag is coming up with some really hot typefaces.
I love that. It's already kind of sensing that there's a laser tag in there. And you can see if this is like a this kind of reminds me of the typeface that James White made for signal noise.
I think it's called neonoir or something like that. It's cool. This one also feels very lasery and laser taggy, which is cool.
So going to do that laser tag. I'm going to duplicate this layer. Oh, I wonder if there's a laser tag image.
Let's see here. Photos. Laser tag.
Oh, yeah. This is awesome. All right, this is exactly what we needed, Chat.
All right. So we're going to do it really quickly. Is going to be like, this is us.
This is all of us in Chat. We're going to go laser tag, boom, boom, boom. And then I'm going to pull this up and be like, cool.
What I'm going to do is actually ungroup this group. Cool. This is awesome.
All right, I'm going to take all the pictures of me are going away because it's about you, Chat, and it's not about me. All right, let's see here. We got this.
So I like these pieces. I think I kind of like that it's on this side. But let's see what we got here.
So if I just go rotate that, maybe it actually looks cute on him there, too. Yeah, that's adorable. All right, cool.
That works. Let's take some more and just say, like, boom, play with that and then do like, where is that typeface we had earlier? So I'm going to go back into the layers. I'm going to pull laser tag, and then I'm going to grab this, be like, cool.
You're invited to laser tag. So by default, you've got these great options. You can just do left align, center align, and right align if you want.
But we can also have a lot of fun, like playing with the type itself. So what we're going to do is man, this typeface is actually really nice. I know we're all sad that we don't have Comic Papyrus, but that's okay.
I'm going to go up here on the top right of the screen and click Duplicate or Command D. And I'm going to play with some different options. So we have a circle version, which I think is really cool, actually fits really nice.
But I'm going to change this to a badge of, like, Alex's, alex's one year birthday party. I'll just do Alex's birthday party instead. I think that's fun.
What we can do is even go into our content. We can add shapes around it if we want. We could start playing with like a circle or square.
Let's go circle. Nice. Perforated do this.
We can change the opacity of it. We can also change how big the border is so we can increase the contrast so it's more legible in that corner. And then we could go into the section on shapes and then click Birthday cake or type in Birthday Cake and it'll give us a vector option for us to play with by just clicking that.
It's already imported it for us. We'll pull that into that center. Boom.
Perfect. So we've already got like a horizontal lockup. This works super fast and quick.
For this, I'm actually just going to click these two pieces together and click group just so it's kind of locked in. And if we move one thing, we don't always forget Cody's asking, where's the smiley face? Because it's a long time inside joke. So I'm going to throw that in there really quick.
Smile the face. Let's go. We got like a minute left.
Throw in a smiley face. Boom. Let me make sure it's yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow.
We want a brighter yellow, obviously. Let's get boom. Perfect.
So we got a little smiley face there. We're going to actually probably take this and throw it behind this to make it like a little bit nicer of a lockup. Little Heidi smiley face.
Got to rotate it just a tiny bit just to get its eye out from under there. Boom. Smiley face done really quickly.
We can also just throw in address later on, but essentially we got the main gist of it in there. We love working in express. I think it's awesome.
It's super fast. You can see that this is an A four ready to send out to all your friends. So make sure that you use Express for any future invites for your birthday parties, holiday parties, any greetings that you want to send, emails, newsletters, all that good stuff as well.
I've had a blast working on this project with you all. Thank you, Chat, for being so wonderful and we will see you all very shortly. Bye.
