*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Alex Lazaris:
Hello, everyone. My name is Alex Lazaris, and I'm your host today. I am here with Saunak. I am so excited. Day two, Saunak gave us so many really great tips and tricks yesterday in Adobe Express. Super excited to see what he comes up with today. But for those of you who may not know Saunak, Saunak, tell us a little bit about you yourself and kind of what you've been up to and what we're going to do today.
Saunak Shah:
Of course. Well, thanks, Alex. And thank you to the team at Adobe Express. So I'm an Indian born, Brooklyn based photographer and graphic designer. I worked for 15 years in the advertising agency So World until I went full time and freelance with my freelance hustle, which is graphic design. So I juggle a bunch of things right now. I have my own collective as well, and I've been an Adobe Express ambassador for the last two years. So I'm just super excited to walk some of the folks through some of the tips and tricks to create compelling graphics for Instagram. I mean, I feel like we're in an economy where everyone's attention span is so minimal, but at the same time, because I have the aesthetic of a formal design background, I feel I'm always more, I guess, biased when it comes to designing, where typography and the sensibilities of texture and photography, everything kind of play an important role. So I'm super excited to be here with all of you. All yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Chat's going crazy. I see a lot of our favorites in Chat. I see. Sam sean Colby. Reverb. Mike, Barbara. Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to day two. I see a lot of hype for today's session, so that's super exciting. Seems like reverb. Mike really likes people's lunch photos on Instagram, and I know it's lunchtime for you right now in New York, so I'm sure it's very topical.
Saunak Shah:
Yeah, it is noon here. So where's everyone tuning in from? Definitely feel free to ping your questions in the chat. Welcome, everyone. This is going to be a pretty quick session. I do want to quickly touch on some of my work. A lot of my work basically focuses on the sensibility of who I am as a creator. And I feel like that little element of storytelling is always interesting and important in all we do. So whether you're a small business owner or someone who's really just getting into design, using design to storytell and tell your point of view, I think it's really important to be able to understand some of these nuances. So the flow for today is that we have quick, like 25, 25 minutes. I'm going to quickly basically demo you some of the UI and the functionality of Adobe Express. For those who are not familiar with Adobe Express, I'd love to kind of walk you through some of the key features and then also basically show you how you can create different buckets of content pieces for different story content on Instagram. I mean, of course we all take amazing photos, but I think it's nice to kind of take a step back to really think of what are these content pieces and how will they actually tell a little bit more about who we are as creators. So whether it's a product that you're selling, whether know you're working in collaborative teams, Adobe Express has a lot of native functionality where you can create brands, you can be collaborative with your team members, and you can also save a lot of these projects as libraries. So when you do that, you're able to basically go back to those templates and not have to recreate them from start. Right? So how are we doing on timing? All right, how's everyone doing in the chat? Thanks everyone.
Alex Lazaris:
We see people from all over the world. We got Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, nigeria.
Saunak Shah:
I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
Colorado. Culpit just moved to Colorado. Congrats on the move.
Saunak Shah:
Awesome. All right, cool. So I'm going to jump right in and if everyone can see my screen, this is basically the homepage. And of course, Adobe Express is available on mobile as well as desktop. Right? And off the bat you can see the UI is pretty streamlined. Everything, all these templates, there are like thousands and thousands of templates that are aggregated based on categories. Right, right here, I'm on the home screen right now, but you can go into projects and don't mind me for looking up on my second screen and looking down towards you too. So if you have a question, definitely ping it to Alex and Alex can reroute it here in the stream.
Alex Lazaris:
If you're typing in chat and you're wondering why you're not seeing your messages, it's probably because you're on YouTube. So make sure you come over to Adobe Live and we'll read your chats in the behance chat.
Saunak Shah:
Awesome. Perfect. Okay, so here are where all our projects basically get stacked. Every new project gets stacked here. There is a section here for brands. Like I said, I have my own brand, which is Saunakspace, which is I use that for a lot of my own content, influencer, marketing materials. I have pursued a Portraits, which is my collective, so I have their logo assets. And when you're creating brands, you can basically also go into the details of what fonts you can use and what color styles you can use, which is like super awesome. I don't have to do that all over again. And you can have them all do here. Of course, Adobe Express is integrated with Adobe fonts as well as Adobe stock, which is the beauty of this entire package. Right? There's this cool thing called Adobe Libraries, which I was talking about earlier, where you can basically save all your templates right here. So I have my Saunak Space templates here, and if you look at some of these categories right, I've been able to categorize each one of them based on different things. Like there's a spotlight. There's like an iconography, kind of a template. There's a type poster. There's a template for new work. There's a template for photo collage branded assets, a poll, Instagram poll. So what I'm trying to do basically, essentially, is that I'm taking some of the native functionality of the stickers or the things that folks use on Instagram stories, but I'm actually taking a step forward using Adobe Express. So when that content piece comes up on your content calendar, you can literally just go here, update those things on a fly. And literally, I'll show you a couple of projects. You can do them in minutes. And then we also have a new update with scheduler, which is amazing because now you can schedule all your posts. You can create projects where you have multiple layouts. You can save them all on your desktop, or you can schedule them to be able to go on different social media channels, right, which is amazing. I think Pinterest just got added. So Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, the works. So what I'm going to do today, real quickly, how are we doing with time? We are like, okay, we got ten past. All right, so I'm going to quickly show you how you can quickly create a story from scratch. And again, mind you, we're not doing a super deep dive here. I just want to kind of have everyone get a feel of some of the templates I've created, but something that you can create from scratch. So if you click on the plus icon here, you see know you can basically have any template for Facebook post Instagram. You have some quick actions here that are pretty useful. A lot of times when I want to create a quick PDF or I want to resize or trim a video, but here we're going to dive into an Instagram story. So when you create an Instagram story, you're going to get your canvas here already sized to the story dimensions. And here on the left, you see your panel where it has all the templates. What I'm going to do for this one is that I'm going to upload one of my own photos here. And of course, you're free to browse through all the Adobe stock photos as well. So when I upload a photo, let's see, I'm going to use a photo of Super Nero. Super Nero is a musician that I recently met in an event that I was curating for Adobe. And they were there at the event, and the event was for Pride Month. Of course, I work with a lot of LGBTQ artists, so it's really important for me that my storytelling is obviously showcasing their strengths. So this is Super Nero. Now they just put out a new single, which is called Shit That I Do. And imagine if they wanted to create a quick update on their new single that is on Spotify or something. So here on the left, if you go to text, there are a lot of cool inbuilt text lockups that are so amazing. I mean, you can literally just browse through all of them. And the UI is so streamlined and straightforward. So this is grouped. So I would go here and basically ungroup this lockup first, right? So I ungroup the lockup and now all these elements are pretty independent on their own, right? So now I want to say and here you can see on the right hand side that there are a lot of font recommendations, which is amazing. Like Adobe Fonts is integrated and right away you can see like, you can play around with the fonts you want, which is really nice. I love the flexibility there. So I'm going to use something that's a little bit more bolder on this one. And then you can basically go and update your title right here. So I'm going to say out now, no pun intended, and that's pretty cool. And then right here, you can basically go and change the colors. Super straightforward. You can change them to whatever you want. I'm going to change it to white. I'm going to bring it right here. All right? And then on this one, I'm going to basically say shit that I do, which is basically their new single, right? And the other cool thing is like, here you see the effects panel here. So you can basically play around with all these. You can add a shadow, you can basically add an outline. In this case, I just want it to be like linear. So I'm going to basically have that here. I want this to be another font. So I'm going to go here, I'm going to play with some of these fonts. I'm going to use the Serif font and that's pretty much it. I think the key is to be able to make it your own and have fun with it. The assets, everything is right, can. And this one I can say now on, let's just say Spotify, right? And then the cool thing with colors as well is that if I want to use a custom color, I can take the dropper here. I can go select like a color from their outfit or it comes close to where it is here and I can go and choose a lighter color. So again, you see it's super simple. And there it is. And then the other cool thing is on the left here. You see we have all these shapes and all these design assets. The sky is the limit, really. I mean, I can add text frames. Let's see if I'm looking for shapes, if I search for a music icon, right? Like just because it's the new single. So I have so many cool icons to choose from and I can choose a music icon and boom, it's right here. So I love the flexibility to be able to just have all these templates at my disposal, right? So a lot of mean, we as designers, we like we're literally searching on Google. We're searching on different sites. We're actually purchasing images with this package. I feel like it's a win win because we already have an arsenal, so to speak, of tools. Right? And then you can actually go here and create multiple pages so you can see that I can create multiple pages of it, and I can update those based on different imagery. I can update the call to Actions, I can update the messaging. So it's really cool. And then I can also go here and resize this for any other format that I want. And I think that's the beauty of it, that you can play around with what you've already created, but have the flexibility to kind of change it up. All right, so that was the project from Scratch that I wanted to show you. Folks obviously shout out to Super Nero for their single. I want to quickly walk you through some of the projects that I already have in my so I'm going back to my Saunak Space templates, and let me see what I would show you on this one. Actually, you know what? I want to show you an option of how to search for templates. I think there are a lot of these inbuilt templates that are already here. So, for instance, imagine I was searching for a template. Say I have a product sale, right? Like a new product sale. I would search for sale. And then you see that we have all these beautiful templates for sale. Oh, my God. It's a plethora of templates. I would start from. Say I picked up this template, which is basically for sale, and again, I can update it to whatever I want it to be. I'm going to start with updating the image, which I can go click replace. Again, I'm going to use an image. I've already downloaded an image from Adobe Stock. In this case, in your case, it could be anything you want it to be. Basically your new product, a line of merch. And here you can see there's a filter added so I can have it be I can play around with the filters. Now I can go and change this. I can ungroup this, and I can play with the fonts. I mean, again, the beauty of this is that I don't have to look for fonts manually. Look at these amazing type styles that are populated with my creative. I mean, how cool is that? I can just play around with this. This is like my job's done. I know as we as designers, we're so picky about these little nuances, and we want everything perfect. But I feel like with templates, my job's done, and I can focus on what's more important, which is basically like, putting my stories out there in the least time. Don't you agree, Alex? I know you've got formal training too.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I would say both, but yeah, I love that Express makes it so quick you can knock out stories in three minutes flat and be done for the day.
Saunak Shah:
Yeah, don't get me mean, you know, I use all the Adobe arsenal of software for different things, and they all have such amazing capabilities, so to speak. Right. But as far as like, I think if you're someone who is getting into design, or someone who is interested to get into design without much design background, or someone who also has design background but just wants something efficient and quick, you know what mean? Like, I think Adobe Express really comes through with that, so all right, so that was a project from scratch. How are we doing on time? All right, cool. We have about five to ten minutes.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm going to crystal says I'm picky about templates. As a designer, I like to create from scratch. I can understand that sentiment, but from my perspective, I've seen so many clients mess up their Instagram post or watermark images. Weird and all these other things. What I love now running my own design firm is being able to hand off express templates to the client and know that even if they're not hiring me to post these stories and things like that for them anymore. I know that they're in good hands because they just need to follow the templates that I've already built and streamlined and they can post really quickly so they can go back to doing their job, which is their business, not social posting.
Saunak Shah:
I love that. I think we're going towards a space which is collaborative, right? Co collaborative. And I feel like having being able to share these assets with your clients and invite other folks you can see on the right here, I can invite anyone here as a collaborator, and they can actually take my template. And for instance, this is a template I created for a poll, right? And imagine now I sent to the client, and then the client is like, wait a second, we want more color. What's up with this? This is not our vibe. So they can change the filter on it, they can mess around with it. In this case, if they feel like, okay, this is not the graphic we want, they can basically go use any of the graphics that are available to them, or they can use one of their own photos. In this case, obviously, maybe they decide they want to use another shot of Mumbai. Right. Again, I feel like the flexibility for our clients, like, here again, they're probably finicky about this font that I used, and they can quickly make those updates here, which is the beauty of it. They don't want this background, and they can literally go here and search for some of the backgrounds. They can search a travel background. They can search pretty much anything and they can be able to update these amazing graphics, right? And again, the beauty of all this is that the interface is so intuitive that you can play around with all these assets. It's a lot like the functionality is a lot of, like, the other softwares as well, but it's also available on mobile. And I appreciate that that flexibility is there. And then you can also multiply so you can use newer graphics and you can have fun with it. So that was one that I created for like, a poll for Instagram, right? So let me take you through a couple of more just to get you a feel of this. Let me do one of my classic. One is a type poster. I mean, who doesn't like a type poster? So this is of course, a lot of times when the writer in me comes up, I'm kind of getting nostalgic and sentimental and I'll come up with some of my photography that I use over type posters, and I feel like they really resonate well with my audience as well. So in this case, like, you see, this was a stock image, I believe. But I want to upload one of my own photos here. So I would go update that super quick. Here, you can basically add it to the background. Now you see there are two, but you can actually delete that cell. So again, there's so much flexibility with these things. Again, with the type. Beautiful. I can literally play around with this. And again, by the end of the day, I think you're going to use your own sensibilities a little bit. And with time, you can really fine tune some of these things. I love the fact that I have all these icons, all these graphics right here, and that's one of the examples with a type poster. Let me take you through a couple of more. I told myself, let me show you five real quickly.
Alex Lazaris:
We have about five minutes remaining.
Saunak Shah:
Oh, perfect. I think we're doing good. There's another really great feature here with layouts. And with layouts is like, you can use multiple photos and you can actually play around with those as well. So in this case, if you go to layout, you see here on the right hand side, there are so many grids. And as I change these grids, my photos are basically being updated by themselves, which is cool. And then I can move them, I can resize them, which is so cool. So that was one of the layouts. And then let me show you another one because why not? How's everyone doing in the chat? Everyone feeling some of these?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, great. Crystal and I and Sean are having a whole conversation around templates saying, don't mind creating templates from scratch or handing them the client to use. But I'm still picky about using a template that is already created. And I said that it's sometimes easiest and Sean said this as well. Use the replace button.
Saunak Shah:
The amazing thing is that shauna, who was it you mentioned? Who was that?
Alex Lazaris:
It was crystal.
Saunak Shah:
Crystal. The amazing thing is that if you're a designer and you're nitpicky about your templates, you can also create your own templates for the community, which is amazing, and they can be remixed over and over again by thousands and thousands of creators. So, for instance, we're here in Templates, right? If you search Saunak Space, which is obviously my handle, I did some Pride templates, custom Pride templates, which these have been remixed over 8000, 9000 times by folks. So that's amazing. So I can start with my own template. And I know that, okay, this is my stuff. Now, here, I can change the layout. I can have fun with it. So, for instance, if I want to change this image again, let me show you real quick. I can go upload an image that I already have. In this case, I'm going to upload a photo that I took of a good friend of mine, richa artist extraordinaire. What did I do? Okay, right here. So, again, I can take any template and I can update it to mine, but I can also create my own templates. And that's the beauty of it. You know what I mean? So I feel like the flexibility for some of these things are limitless. I think it really comes down to how, as a designer and storyteller, you're able to communicate your own unique point of view. And I feel like it's like as a photographer, people ask me all the time, what are your gears? What do you use? What lens do you shoot with? And I'm like, you know what? That's all semantics, really. I think what's really important is your own unique point of view. And I think that needs to be really laid up, because by the end of the day, sure, there's a lot of resources out there, but I want you to be able to take a step back and see how you can use Adobe Express to really create your own unique point of view in the storytelling. And how does that add to the greater narrative of who you are as a creator? Because I feel like with my own personal story, having lived in India for, I don't know, half my life and lived here in the US. I'm always doing this juggle where the dichotomy of identity and who I am as a creator. Funny enough, this project that I work with Richa on was also called Who Are We? So it's like 360. I feel like there's so much room for intentional storytelling. And I feel like with the capability of you being able to have your branding, you being able to create your own aesthetic through libraries, you being able to have your own storytelling. I feel like it's really valuable for a lot of folks to be able to take their craft to the next level. Right. I think by the end of the day, that's important. So here are some of the templates that I showed you and some more templates just to kind of get a sizzle of what you can do.
Alex Lazaris:
Crystal wants to know, how do you share your templates with the community so that everybody can access them? I know we have less than a minute, so is there any quick way.
Saunak Shah:
You can do it? You create a fresh project and then you can save them into the library. And I think you basically from there, you make it remixable so that you can make it available. I think some of the steps, I might just have to look through them, but I think it's pretty doable where you can actually create your own templates. There are thousands of thousands of templates. They're created by someone. They're created by folks that are either ambassadors or folks that are using Express. Before it was express. I've been an ambassador since we were Spark. I love the community aspect because that actually puts your name and your brand and your work towards so many other people as well. Perfect.
Alex Lazaris:
Well, that's it for time for the last two days. Thank you, Saunak, so much for hanging out with us and showing us around Express. I've really enjoyed the stream. I hope you enjoyed streaming it. Chat, thank you for hanging out with us and stick around for more Adobe Live. Just a couple of minutes. We'll see you later today.
Saunak Shah:
Awesome. Thank you, everyone. Thanks.
