*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 run a little tiny studio called Lazaris and you can check out our work wearelazaris.com,
but enough about me. Hello, everyone. If you are tuning in for the first time, we are going to be doing Adobe Express today and we're going to be working on Lord of the Rings inspired wedding invitations.
I know a lot of people loveless or Aragorn or any of the Hobits. You choose them, but I am a Gimli nerd. I love Gimli.
He's a short king. He's amazing. So we're getting married to Gimli today and you guys are all invited to join me in making these invites.
So I'm very, very excited. But without further ado, if you are tuning in, make sure that you come over to behance at Be netlife and you will be able to see the live stream and you can type into Chat and you can get all the good information, you can ask all the questions you want really quickly. I know we only have 30 minutes today, so we're going to jump on in.
So if you are new to Express, come on over. It's kind of got some of the best of everything. You can edit some videos really quickly.
You can make Gifs, you can do animations, you can do social content, you can start scheduling stuff. You can use templates, you can start original design assets. Lots and lots of things you can do with an Express.
And I'm going to show you how to do them very, very quickly today. So come on over to my screen and we are going to start cranking out some beautiful work. If you're not familiar with the flow of what an Express page looks like, here it is.
This is kind of a great way to start quick firing, creating work. So if you're going to make like, an Instagram story, maybe a post, a Facebook post, a poster, logo, flyer, whatever you need. We've already got these templates and quick starters for you to start cranking out this great work.
We can also see this quick to action selection bar. You've got some popular things like removing backgrounds and resizing stuff that's also super helpful. If you are maybe managing social media for a client or some stakeholders, you might need the scheduling feature.
This is a very cool feature where you can start actually creating and scheduling your post early on. So you got Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn. You can start scheduling these things out.
It's huge. It's such a time saver. It gets you in there very quickly.
So I'm very excited about this stuff. All right, so we'll go back. That's enough about that section.
If you are working with a brand, you might have one in this section you can add. I've shown a couple of times on a couple of other Express things. You can create your own brand, you can upload your logos.
I see, Sam. I see Paco in Chat. What's up, everyone? Sean, hello.
Hello, Barbara. Hello. Welcome.
If you're seeing Chat that's in the right spot, great. If not, you're probably on YouTube. Make sure you come over behance to check out the stream there.
But if you are going to do your brands, you can click upload your logos, choose colors, add fonts, and it'll give you a beautiful magic wand tool that you can use to make all your collateral uniform and consistent very quickly. But we're not going to be working on that today. Today we're starting from, you know, we can go here in the top left and we can choose maybe a Facebook post or a logo.
And we'll start with some default template sizes if we want to. But really what I'm going to do is I'm going to start searching up here. I'm going to look for Save the Date.
I want to see what people are doing in the save the date range so this would know when I'm getting everybody together. I want everybody to start marking their calendars, saving the weekend. Gimli has a pretty big family, so I want to make sure that we get all these invites out early on so that everybody's scheduling their vacation time to come hang out with us for our very special day.
So you can see already, if you have saved the date you typed in, you can start scrolling through templates and pieces already there for you to start messing with. This is super simple. Great way to start.
If you like the aesthetics of something, you click it, you start to play with it. I really like this piece. This one over here feels like it has some fall leaves.
It's got some great cursive. It also feels very I don't know, it feels very Lord of the Rings to me. It's got the gold Kyler palette in there.
You've kind of got a little bit of the gold ring vibe happening. So what I'm going to do here is just start swapping in content. So because this is already such a great starting point for me, maybe I want to change the colors, maybe I want to change the background.
That's all totally fine and acceptable and we can do it. I want to maybe use this center circle as a crop and maybe just keep my name and Gimli's name above it. So what I'm actually going to do is just type in my command aid, everything.
So I select everything. What I'm going to do is actually just click this edit text. I'm going to type my full name and I'm going to do Gimli.
Gimli, son of Gloan. That's how you say his name. You'd think I would know when I'm getting married to my betrothed because I lost my Typy tool.
There we go. Bring that back in here. I got my notes.
Boom. Son of Gloin. Easy.
All right. So that's full name, that's a lot. As you can see kind of a mess right now.
We're going to fix that, so don't worry. I'm going to just adjust this. I'm going to start moving content around.
So what I'm going to do is on the bottom right of the screen, you've got your layer section within Express. So as you can see, there's a bunch of different things happening. If I want to, I can move this type that I have all the way down below all these other elements and it's going to hide it.
So by moving our names below the floral elements, that hides it behind those elements. So that's something to keep in mind. If you're wondering why you're not seeing something, it's probably hidden behind a layer and that's totally fine.
I'm actually going to remove these corner elements. Click that one. I can either click it or I can select the layer itself on the corner.
So if I wanted to, I could also go down to the bottom left and choose that one and press delete. Boom, done. This formal Invitation to follow section is nice, but I think it's a little bit too big.
So I'm actually just going to lower it down from 14.6 to 12.8. And then what I'm going to start doing is plopping in some more content.
Maybe I'm going to move this Houston address away. So it's already past September 2021. So we're going to just say, I don't know, we'll give people a year, so it'll be 828, 2023 and then Houston, Texas.
And then if I want to, I can either change the type sizing here, or I can go and just shrink this section. This content block is a really easy way to just kind of play with the type. But if I wanted to adjust this section as well, you can see by just changing how the type selection tool is so we have capitalize and fit and that's going to make sure everything fits in that bounding box.
I've put this onto two separate layers if I wanted to. I can make it one layer and just space it. And what it will allow me to do is if I wanted to change the bounding box, it will snap away from just being one, being two layers and fitting in that rectangle box.
And it'll now switch it to being a full single line. So you have lots of options. It starts to just play with it as it breaks down.
You get a three line, a two line, a one line. Lots of really great options to do with the capitalizing fit. You can also do a rotation or a circular type tool as well.
Half circles up and down. You have grids, lots of cool things. You have the magic buttons.
I typically like to stay with the capitalize and fit, and I could just shrink that and make it smaller and then I can center it. But right now we're still messing with stuff. We're pushing around the screen.
It's totally fine to stay messy at this stage. What we're going to do is actually move this around. I'm going to change this type and make it maybe we'll just shrink it down a little bit, bump it down to 48 and then that's good.
It's feeling better. What I'm going to do is end up moving this content. So right now these are not grouped.
What I'm going to do is actually change the background color. I'm going to make this white. We might change that back later on, but I like the simplicity of the white.
It's a wedding. Got to have white. All right.
So we're going to end up grouping these. Press Command G, and I'm going to grab this and this, and then Command G. And now I've got this whole section right there.
I'm going to let the type go up, scoot it up. I don't know if I want the red yet, but we'll play with that in bit. I've got photos here as well.
So if you're new to working with Express, Express is free to use. But it does get better with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. If you go to the section and type in anything you want in the photo section, you can start pulling things.
So really, because this is Lord of the Rings named, what I'm going to do is type in Lord of the Rings and I'm going to pull the ring into this. I know that this would never be a good actual wedding ring to give anybody, but it is pretty, it is gold. And for the sake of having fun, we're going to be giving out the ring.
So what I'm going to do is actually go to the crop section from this image. I have a lot of different options within the cropping. I can do squares one by ones, nine by 1660 by nines.
If you have certain ratios, you can also set those up as well, or you can set for different crops. So you can do very specific, like half circle, full circle, ellipses, ovals, stars, hearts, pentagrams, everything you might need all in this area. So let's show you what that looks like.
So if I was to crop it with a star, don't necessarily recommend cropping this ring with a star, but you can see how you do it. I'm actually just going to choose the circle option and I'm going to mess with the spacing of it. I'm just trying to get as much of the ring and its reflection all in there.
Sean says, I can feel the love. I'm so glad you can feel it because it is a very special moment for me in my betrothed gimli. It's amazing.
So boom. Got the reflection in there. I like that the flowers around the corners and the edges are starting to feel like consistent with the ring as well.
We got to save the date roll invitation to follow. So I've got this type here. This is great.
I love the cursive, but I don't love the line spacing. So it's pretty high. Line spacing is the difference between both lines, the top and the bottom.
What we're going to do is we're going to shrink that down, get it closer. I could even make this one line potentially if I wanted to, but I think I might just adjust the copy below it. So I want this to be smaller still.
What I'm going to do is actually just manually drag it. Formal invitation to follow. Boom.
And then I'm going to want this color just so it's kind of staying consistent. I'm going to choose that so it's suggested based off of the color palette as well, that we have in this document. Easy.
And then I'm going to actually just left align or center align this and try to adjust it. So I'm taking it off of the original capitalize and fit that we had just so I can start trying to mimic what we have here with Hypatia sounds, pro italic. And then we've got the regular.
I'm going to move this to italic as well, just so it feels a little bit more consistent. Actually what I'm going to do, I'm going to pull all this copy directly into this text. Boom.
And that should help a little bit more it's. And what we're going to do is we're center that cool. And then I'm going to adjust the line spacing just a tiny bit, get those kind of not competing as much.
And I'm just going to pull it down. Perfect. So that's a pretty simple way to just knock know this one flyer.
Maybe it's a flyer, maybe it's a poster, whatever. We might need chat. If you think that should be two letters or two lines or one line, let me know.
Happy to adjust it. Sean says Alex likes his bling. That is true.
Gimli deserves it, man. All right, so we're going to scoot the silver. So what we're going to do here is we're going to click my project.
I'm going to name this wedding invite, I guess. Let's save the date. Save the date.
Boom. Easy peasy, save the date. And what I'm going to do is actually I'm going to click duplicate.
So we've got this in a nine by 16. Looks like the ratio is for it. That's great.
What I'm actually going to do now is I'm going to make like a social post. So? Maybe. I don't know.
Dwarves are a little bit hard to track down sometimes, right? So maybe the only way that they can keep up with your wedding invite is through social media. So you're like, oh, all right, well, I got to make sure that one of Gimli's best dwarves gets the invite. It's hard to get him a postal address for his postcode.
So maybe we need to just bang this out as a social graphic. So to do that, all you need to do is go to this resize button. So once you've already got an asset built, once, you can do it very easily.
So click the resize. You can now change it from a poster to a card, an A four. So if you need a letter size print job, you can do that as well.
Or you can change it out to any social graphics you might have or need for your social profile. Or you can do standards one by ones, squares, landscapes, all that stuff. So for, like, an Instagram post, we'll use a square one by one.
So what we're going to do is quickly just click resize, and as you can see, we're, like, 99% of the way done with this asset just by clicking the resize tool. So what now I'm going to do is just move everything down a little bit more, give a little bit more space to the official wedding invite, knowing that this might be seen only on the social side. I'm going to want that copy to be a lot bigger and a lot easier to read.
So I'm going to bump that up. So what we're going to do is just quickly grab this, and I'm going to select the ring as well. Going to put it above that, and then I'm going to group, and then I'm going to just slide it down.
Slide, slide, slide. Save the date. Boom.
I'm going to want to make sure that I keep this all on one line, though, this time, just by dragging that out. I've got it there. And then I'm going to snap to the pink line, and then I'm going to bump up this copy.
I want this to be a lot easier to read. I don't know why. Invitation to follow is breaking.
There we go. Cool. So I want to make sure that the snaps, I'm going to wait for it to snap on the pink line.
Boom. So boom. Done.
Hammered out two invites within less than, like, I don't know, 15 minutes already. So let's keep going. We've got this.
Okay. It's a little bit too big now we have to adjust this boom. So that's pretty cool.
Very easy, very simple to do. We can start cranking out more of them if we want, or we can even go in and try different things within it. Haley says, will the date stay that small? Nope.
We just adjusted the date to be bigger. It doesn't have to always be this small. It can be if you need it to.
I recommend for social posts on a one by one, making sure that the type is still really legible. It's all really important stuff to do when you're creating these assets. All right, cool.
If we wanted to also, if we wanted to maybe do something a little bit more eye catching, we can go to the animation tool. What the animation tool will do is it'll give us options for animating in the text typewriter effect is actually really lovely. I think for this invite.
What you'll be able to do as well is download. Whenever you download things, if you have animated stuff, you can download as MP4, you can download all your assets with PNGs, with transparent background or JPEGs and PDFs as well. So you have that option in the top right of your screen.
If you need to. You can also share it. So if I wanted to publish it, I can do that.
I can also invite people. So maybe Gimli wants to edit this himself. I can invite Gimli to this project and they can collaborate in real time as well and just hammer out assets together.
This is really good for clients or stakeholders as well, so they can start seeing it. But if I love this piece so much, I can also make this a template. So it's super helpful when you're creating stuff.
So from an animation perspective dynamic. So you have all these different options. You got flickr, little bit too fancy probably for this wedding invite.
So I like the typewriter. It feels especially with the script type, it feels like it's kind of being done by hand, which is really lovely. Then you've also got color shuffle, which will change through the palette that you have on your document.
You have a fade ability as well, so you can just kind of have it naturally just fade in or fade out. You got slide boom. You've got grow, so it just gets larger and zooms out and zooms in.
You got photo animation. So this is going to treat only the photos versus the type that you had earlier. You have kind of the zoom in zoom out effect.
You got pans here and then you've got a gray if you need to blurs as well. I don't really use the blur very often. It has to be very delicate.
Fades, colors, boom. But we're going to stick with none none for right now. But if we did want to do a motion graphic, we can do that really quick.
That's great. So that's one asset. We can also resize it again.
Maybe we're doing some paid social ads and we want to see which one performs better. We can also just quickly spin up a version of this by duplicating it again. And then we can just change the color palette in the background and make sure that it's still kind of elegant.
We can see if the white background performs better than the cream color as well, but it kind of starts to look a little bit funky with the ring. But what we can do to the ring is we can also just edit it. We can add a gray scale to it.
We can do darken, lighten, matte, contrast. We can change some of these really quickly within the filters tool, multiply. You can also do a duotone.
So maybe I want to copy something that's a little bit in more alignment with the color palettes that we have with this page as well. But I'm not going to do that. I'm actually just going to turn off the filters on that piece.
We also have the enhancements. You can increase the contrast brightness. I don't know if you ever need to make the ring actually more attractive and more beautiful, but you can adjust all those colors within that.
You can also blur it. So if you needed to do maybe a teaser asset, maybe something's coming soon and you want to just hint at what's coming down the pipeline, but maybe not there yet, you can also do that with the blur effect, which is also really great. I'm going to adjust the background back to white.
Boom. Crystal clear. Cool.
So we have that option. We have a bunch of different things we can do within the colors. I already showed you all that stuff.
We can also see how a different template could look as well. So if I was going to save the date or you can do a wedding, you can look for wedding templates as well. So one thing I forgot to mention earlier is that if you do start looking through these templates and stuff and you see the crown in the corner, it'll say if you have access or you don't.
That crown just means that you're using Creative Cloud and you get access to all those special stock assets or templates because you have creative cloud. And that's what I meant earlier by it getting better with creative cloud. I'm going to create from this template really quickly.
Let's hammer it out. I know we only have like five minutes left, so we're going to do it very quick. And I want to show you the power of using Express to knock out assets very fast.
So we've got this beautiful image of flowers behind. We'll do Alex and Gimli. Boom.
I'm actually going to pull that down. Boom. Now I'm going to change out this copy here.
Gimli. And then should probably just center all this stuff. I'm actually going to ungroup this by clicking on that layer and ungrouping it and then selecting this type and this type, and then centering it together.
Boom. Working nice. I think Ghibli is going to be thrilled with this.
Very excited to show him. Let's see here. We can change this out to he said yes.
I don't know if that's the actual website. Don't go to it. Let's just skip that.
All right, so we'll plan a wedding for you. We'll say you're invited, are invited. We'll adjust that.
Cool. And then do this. So now we're centering it in the perfect spot and we'll do the three minutes.
Throw this in there. We're going to throw in maybe we so if you ever want to, you can also click Remove Background on these places. You can also click Replace so if I want more flowers in there, that's great.
But I also really like this flower already. What I'm actually going to do is duplicate it by clicking duplicate. And what I'm going to do is replace.
I'm going to upload a photo, and I'm going to just grab a beautiful photo of my lovely, lovely Gimli. Because he's the star in our relationship. I'm going to zoom out.
The crop actually going to just freeform. Maybe I'll just keep it circle. I think the circle crop is good.
I love it. I'm going to pull this. Boom.
What a beautiful man. All right. I'm going to also grab shapes.
So if I like shapes of some size, I'm typing heart. I can grab those really quickly. You have different options within the shapes.
So you have basic shapes here, which is great. If you click the basic shapes and you see that it has like a stroke like that, you have the ability to adjust fill and the border. So that's super, super helpful.
You can get the border to be even thicker and fatter, or you can also just turn off the fill and you can just have the stroke on the outside, which is super nice as well. You can use different options as well. You have this heart here.
I think I might see what I can do. Maybe I should do. Does it have a heart? It does have a heart.
Oh, my goodness. Look at him. Look at him.
He's so cute in the heart. What a beauty. All right, let's throw this in here as well.
We'll adjust this color to match the color palette that's already there. Command X. I'm going to pull this behind the year invited, so I'm going to actually pull you're invited above it.
And then I'm going to grab both of them and then align horizontally. Align vertically. One thing you'll notice with the heart shape is that when you align it vertically, it's optically off, even though it's geometrically correct in the center.
So what I'm going to actually do there is line it with my eye and then just visually place it in there. You start to see it. Boom.
We said Houston originally, I think. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this real quick, and we'll do the Houston.
And we're just going to put it all in one line. Actually, no, I like it on two lines. I'm going to just adjust the copy size down just so everybody knows that we're where they're supposed to be going for this beautiful wedding.
So really quickly, what we've done is done three different assets within 30 minutes from scratch from templates, and we've built it really quickly. Make sure that you come back tomorrow. We're going to be doing more Lord of the Rings work in Express.
I'm very excited. Don't forget to mark your calendars for Gimli and my wedding. I'm very excited to see you all there.
See you all soon. Come back. Bye.
