*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Alex Lazaris:
Hello everyone. My name is Alex Lazarus and I'm your host today. And I'm joined with Saunak Shah I am so excited for you all to hang out with us for the next 30 minutes as we jump into Adobe Express. It's one of my favorite programs. I think Saunak sounds like it's also one of your favorites since you're in Ambassador.
Saunak Shah:
Love it.
Alex Lazaris:
If you guys are tuning in on YouTube, make sure you come over to behance at Adobe Live so you can chat with us, interact with us. If you have any questions at all, we will be able to answer them for you real time wherever you're tuning in from around the world. Thank you for joining us this morning. We're very excited to have you. Senator. Tell us everything about yourself.
Saunak Shah:
I would love to know more about you of course. Well thank you everyone for tuning in from all around the world. This is super exciting. This is of course my first Live. So excuse any technical glitches here but I'm an Indian born New York City based portrait photographer graphic designer. I went to school for graphic design and advertising. I have about 15 years of experience in advertising and over the years I've been able to be able to streamline a lot of my communication and I feel like that's where Adobe Express comes into play. I've been an Adobe Express Ambassador for the last two years and having worked with teams but also collaborative efforts with other creators has actually been able to really been fulfilling. So I'm really happy to be able to walk some of you all through some of my work and basically show you a little bit more about the basics of Adobe Express for a lot of folks that are new and joining for the first time. I know sometimes it can be super overwhelming to just get on board with something new, a new software, especially with folks that are used to designing in other softwares that are offerings by Adobe. Adobe Express is a one stop shop for a lot of the editing work that can go into creating content, especially content for social. Today I'm of course going to be focusing on how to authentically create pleasing content for IG stories and I want to be able to walk you folks through some of the content buckets that, you know, play around with text but also design and photography. Obviously this segment will be super valuable to first time users but also folks that have been using different softwares. And I want to be able to show you what Adobe Express has to offer and how it's integrated with other offerings like Adobe Fonts and Adobe stock. And I think it's really valuable for any small business owner, young entrepreneur to be able to quickly jump in and be able to create these graphics on the go for mobile but also for desktop. So real mean I want to take a couple of minutes to just touch a little bit on my work. I'm a portrait photographer based out of Brooklyn. A lot of the work that I do, of course, has a really strong arch in storytelling. I feel like storytelling is super key for a lot of folks, and as we're getting more and more in tune with the relevancy of our storytelling, of who we are as creatives, I think we all have a huge responsibility to be able to put our best foot forward, right? So I think that's super important. I work with a lot of themes around women empowerment, around the LGBTQ community, around minorities, people of color. So I think as viewers and as you being the audience, I obviously urge you folks to also think about those themes a little bit more intentionally, because I feel like that's when your work really shines. If you look at my work already, I feel like one of my signature pieces, because my background is in advertising and graphic design, I'm able to use color and typography to really accentuate the storytelling that I want to put forward. So, yeah, I love your work.
Alex Lazaris:
I think you're super talented. Your portraits are incredible. How are some of those things? I know you talked about really trying to put forward a story, and I know we're going to be working in Express and making stories today. What are some of those kind of key things that people should be thinking about as they're working in Express to help tell that story?
Saunak Shah:
Of course, I think let me share quickly a content piece that I created here, which will basically give you all an idea of some of the buckets that I'm thinking of when I'm creating stories. I think this is super important. When I'm thinking about stories, I'm just not thinking about color or typography or texture. I'm thinking about larger content pieces. And Adobe Express really gives you the flexibility to share these content pieces, create them, but also be able to save them into libraries. So what that does is that if you have a collaborative team working on projects, you can give them access to those libraries, and they can quickly update those on the fly. So here are some of the content pieces, and I'm going to touch a little bit. We have two segments. We have 30 minutes. There's only so much we can cover. So today I'm going to be talking, and we have two segments today and tomorrow. So, folks, please do join in tomorrow. I'm only going to be touching on a few of them today, but I'm going to show you some type posters. I'm going to show you how we can do fonts in a lockup situation. A lot of folks are using IG stories to drive traffic to their website. So I'm going to show you some examples of creating giveaways or promos and also using the layout that's inbuilt into the software to really create dynamic different options for imagery. Does anyone have any questions? How's everyone feeling? Where's everyone from.
Alex Lazaris:
Chat's doing? Great? I was asking people earlier in Chat how many people have already used Express, and Sean is a big fan of it. He's dropping truth bombs all over Chat. It's pretty great. Sean was talking about how creative cloud libraries is often in Express and that LinkedIn and Pinterest has also been added to the exprs scheduler. So in case you're unfamiliar.
Saunak Shah:
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, the scheduling feature is really hot, just launched recently. And of course you can literally automate and schedule your weekly content calendar, which has been super amazing. And you can connect your other social media networks outside of Instagram as well, which is pretty cool. So off the bat, to kind of just jump into the actual user interface, if everyone's here following with me, this is the user interface for Adobe Express. And as you can see off the bat, you can literally start with creating a project. And it's pre populated with a whole bunch of different options. There are Quick actions here, which are my favorite because a lot of times I want to trim a video or if I want to create a quick PDF, there are a lot of options to use Photos to actually quickly create a PDF and send it. But also there are templates for you. So based on your preferences and your projects, you're actually fed some of the templates that are interesting to you. So now quickly to jump into the actual UI a little bit deeper. This is your home page here and the plus sign here. You can basically create any project you want right away here, right? And I'll get into it right in a second. Projects is where all my past projects with Adobe Express live. So it's a really good place to just have those there and they'll be saved here. There's a really cool feature with branding for small businesses. This is a huge thing. So I of course have my own brand, which is Sonic Space, but I also have my Collective, which is Pursuit of Portraits, which is another community of creators here based out of New York City. And that's another story. But and then I have my own studio, which is called the Studio of Curiosity. So what I've done here is that I'm able to add my logo assets, my brand templates, my colors, but also styles to different the main font and the sub font and everything. So it's pretty cool. And having it be completely integrated with Adobe fonts is like amazing. And then the awesome part is libraries. So when you create a project, you can create different libraries. And then let me show you a couple of libraries here. So I have my Sonic Space templates here, for instance, right? And then I have all my templates, the modules and the buckets that I categorized, I showed you earlier. These are all basically organized based on categories. So now I don't have to create something from Scratch. A lot of times I want to show you a quick demo of something that I do on Scratch. But at the same time, if I want an IG story that's focused on a type poster, I think that I can just go here and update it if I want to use the poll functionality on Instagram, but kind of take it a notch further. Right? I have a poll template here. If I have new prints on my site, if I want something branded to my personal brand, if I want a template for Pride Month or International Women's Month or anything, I can basically save them all here, which is super interesting and quick, so I really don't have to. And here is where I can invite people to actually join if I have a team. And then of course, the scheduling is we're not going to go into the scheduling today, but scheduling is pretty cool to actually schedule all your posts. So in a nutshell, that's basically the interface of Adobe Express for a lot of folks that are tuning in the first time. But let me jump in and show you, walk you through a quick project and then also show you how we can edit some of the projects that I already have in my library. Right? How does that sound?
Alex Lazaris:
Sounds great. I love it.
Saunak Shah:
Sounds great. Okay, cool. So to create a project and of course you can basically use this on the mobile device, on your mobile device as well as desktop. I love desktop. Only because I'm old school and larger interface. So here, obviously, our segment today is going to talk about Instagram stories. So off the bat, I selected Instagram stories, and here you see an interface of text. There are so many cool text options here. Photos, all these photos are aggregated from Adobe stock. So a huge repository of Photos. But let me start with using one of my own photos here. So basically we can go into my Photos here and then I can select a photo that I want to use for the story that I want to create today. So let's see. Let me quickly look at where it is. Adobe Assets. All right, cool. So let me start by I don't want to put myself in the front, but for the sake of demoing this, let me be a little narcissistic here. But actually I have a point here. I want to show folks the feature of being able to remove a background, which I thought is pretty cool. So let me give like five minutes to this R1 Quick. So here on the right hand side, you see, you can add it completely to the background. You can take it out from the background. You can remove background, which is super cool. So the AI basically will create an outline of you, which is amazing. And then you can accept that, and then you can play around with it and place it here. So now, of course, I can go here on the left hand side and go into different backgrounds that are there, right? And they're all super cool. And you can actually search different graphics here. For instance, I want something with paint on it, so I can go here. And I'm wearing a blue, so let me see if I can use this one. So I selected a liquid smoke background here, and you can pin it to the background, or you can move freely. So let me be able to move it freely. So again, these are already available in Adobe Express, which is, like, super cool. So now I would just literally here we have a sorting sort of functionality so I can move it to the back. And then we have cool filters here too, which is amazing. I can basically darken the background if I wanted to. I can make it grayscale again. I think the UI is so intuitive. I think it's one of those things that we all need to kind of test out. And Adobe Express is, by the way, free for a lot of folks who want to try it out and test it out. So if I go to text now and you can type your own text here as well, but there are a lot of really dope text lockups, which I love personally. Hold on. Where did this go? Boy, let me just refresh this. I think this second monitor sometimes whoa.
Alex Lazaris:
That is looks like your viewport got increased. Maybe press command or control and then minus key.
Saunak Shah:
Command. Minus key. Yeah, sometimes it does that, which is actually okay, hold on. I think I know how to go about it. Okay, cool. All right, where's the one on the right hand side, though? Okay, let me actually quickly go this way. Okay. All right, we're back. Cool. Oh, my God. This is what I said. Stuff like this. Oh, my God, it harrows me. All right, back to action.
Alex Lazaris:
The great thing is, if your computer ever gives you issues, which I know mine certainly has and definitely has on stream before, all your stuff on Express is saving constantly.
Saunak Shah:
Oh, no, totally. I'm not really worried about the word getting lost, and I'm actually pretty quick with this, but you know how it is on Live. There's always surprises. Okay, so I just basically picked a quick lock up here. You can unlock it, and then I can change all the colors, which is pretty interesting. So again, I mean, a really quick way to show you how you can play around with some of these cool fonts. There are a whole bunch of font recommendations that actually populate right here as well. And then the other cool thing is that you can actually play with other design elements as well. I mean, it's just not shapes you can go to shapes. And then there are other icons here. See, it's a little glitchy right now, but it's typically not glitchy when I'm working. So that's a little bit of a challenge. But hold on. You know what it is? I think it's because I'm trying to maximize the screen, and a lot of times it does that when I try to maximize it. Okay, let me refresh it and see if that basically yeah, you're good.
Alex Lazaris:
While you're sean in Chat was talking about is, like, for your information, crown icons are for the paid version or full CC, and all others are free. And that is correct if you see an asset in the libraries or in your Objects panel or anything like that, that has a crown on it, that's because it's for the paid version or the creative cloud. Or if you have creative cloud, you can have access to it. If not, Exprs is completely free for you to use and for you to check out. So I highly recommend it. Like you said, sometimes it's best to just jump in and see what is available within Express. I think people will be blown away with all the tools. And I know you're showing the Type stuff right now, totally work on and.
Saunak Shah:
Get out the door, so yeah, no, I think sometimes it's just because I'm doing a second screen and it's a little glitchy here, but oh, there you go. Voila. Okay. Oh, my God. I don't know what's going on, guys. Sorry about okay, I think I should be able to be back in the game here. I think it's just a little bit of resizing. I think there's a lot of flexibility with shapes and interesting objects. Let me go back to my project and show you some other interesting different buckets of things. So here, for instance, we have different content pieces here for Instagram stories. The cool thing is that you can basically resize these to however you want them. In my libraries, I wanted to touch on some of my existing projects now, just because I think it's really cool to quickly show you some of the projects that I've created. So, for instance, this one was really interesting. I wanted to have my followers basically link out to a photo shoot giveaway that I was doing on Instagram. And again, some of these assets are so easy to work with, which is amazing. I can basically create these on the fly. I can update these assets. My fonts are all stored here. But also my imagery. I can save the imagery into the library that I have. And again, apologies for this little glitch that's happening. Okay, great. I think for some reason, my mouse is probably too intuitive. Here. For instance, I can select the image. I can quickly go and update this with any image I want. Again, the whole point is to be able to play around with assets that I have and again, here we have different layouts as well. I can delete this cell super convenient. I want to touch quickly. I know we're already I mean, where does this time fly? I tell you sometimes real fast. And Express really this stream, this really needs to be like an hour segment. But again, if I go back to my projects here, if I go back to my libraries, I think apart from actually getting into the nitty gritty of actually designing it, which is pretty seamless, I want to be able to show you some of the benefits of different layouts here because I think the whole segment is a little bit on showcasing the flexibility and the versatility of different templates that we can create with it's. So this is a template that I created with layouts that's actually in built in Adobe Express. And again, I can move this layout, I can change typography, I can do a whole bunch of things here. I have a website announcement graphic that I created which is again, it's super cool to be able to use this to showcase the design aspect of it. But then I can use Instagram to basically add some of the other stickers and the functionalities that are there natively. So I think there's a benefit there to be able to design them aesthetically and then be able to bring it up on Instagram. So, again, this one is a beautiful travel one. So what I do is that instead of actually having icons or gifs in Instagram natively, I want to be able to obviously make utilize all the repository of icons that are here available on Adobe Express. So, yeah, I think in a mean, I would have loved to basically walk you all through some more projects, actually showing you a little bit more. Maybe the next segment I can kind of work around how to alleviate some of these issues here, technically that I'm facing. But I feel like overall I think we get the idea of how we can basically use different graphics.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. Wendy asked in chat. It's been a while since I worked with stories. Can you add them as they are or set them up and be done? Was not sure if it's better to be set it all up at once or if I can just add to it.
Saunak Shah:
So basically we can add different layouts for stories in Exprs. So that's amazing. So instead of creating multiple projects for stories, what I can do is that I can actually add different pages here to this and the same pages that I add. I can a repurpose it for different social channels, or I can basically take the same graphics and test them out with different imagery. And then it's a one stop shop. Because, for instance, if I have like, say, five frames on a story, on an IG story, I'd be able to export them all together, which is pretty amazing. I think the key is to be able to streamline some of the workflow that we're doing. Like, see, here are some of the photos that I've already aggregated. My icons and my logos are all here, so whenever I need to add my logo, I'll be able to just add it right there. So I think a lot of the pain points that creators have when if it's a layout, we're technically opening a layout software. If it's something that's Photoshop heavy or Illustrator heavy, I think some of those softwares have their own sort of strengths, I'm not going to lie. But I feel like the fact that we can do so much in one place is actually amazing. I've had so much of fun with some of these brushes, these watercolor brushes.
Alex Lazaris:
We're going to have to wrap real quick, unfortunately, but we do. Okay, guys, love this stream today. Make sure you come back tomorrow because we're going to have even more wonderful content. Fennec, tell us where you can find you really quickly, and we'll see you all tomorrow.
Saunak Shah:
Yeah. You can follow me at Sonic Space on Instagram and Twitter and Sonic on Behance. And again, thank you so much to the team, adobe Express. This is amazing. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, everyone on the back end helping out. Appreciate it.
Alex Lazaris:
Thank you, everyone. We'll see you tomorrow. Stick around for more streams. Bye.
