*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Alex Lazaris and today we are in day five of the Adobe Express.
No, we're not day five of Adobe Express. We're on day five of your branding boot camp and we were working in Express. So I'm very, very thrilled.
Today is honestly, I think one of the most exciting days out of the whole stream because you've already worked so hard to get where we are today. So we've started with day one was your brand strategy. Your day two was a logo.
Day three was type. Day four was expanding your brand. So doing colors, photos, images, illustrations, anything like that, bringing it into your brand.
And today we're going to actually be making assets all day. This is a very tool specific stream. The rest of it was very strategic and high level.
How to think about your brand, building that strategy, building your design language, being consistent. If you are new to chat or if you're wanting to ask questions, make sure you come over to be.net/AdobeLive. If you are typing into YouTube, I'm not reading your comments from there.
I would love to see them in Behance. So come on over, hang out with the rest of us here. We've got pretty much 30 minutes just to cover working with your brand in Express.
I'm very, very excited. It's one of my favorite tools. I've been doing a lot of these Express streams.
So come hang out with me. Let's go. So really quick recap into this project.
Phases are really one of the big quintessential pieces of day one. We talked about the differences between your discovery phase, your brand strategy phase and your brand design phase. Just a quick recap of the actual work that we've done.
We've gone through mood boards, our different little logos, options, things like that, kind of bucketing it understanding if that's correct for your brand. Showed you how to use shape language to build your own kind of logos or marks and combinations of them. Scrolling down, we showed you how to use the type tool, how to select type for your brand, the differences between Serifs fans, Serifs, all these things.
Make sure you go check out the broadcast before this. If you haven't seen all this stuff, search for branding bootcamp type or logo or expanding your brand or brand strategy and it'll pull you to the right videos on YouTube or Behance showed a little bit of pattern piece. So really quickly for today, we're making a fake brand.
It's Halves. It was kind of what we talked about a little bit on previous streams. Halves is our fake brand.
No clients, no nothing. Just us making pretty things. We're going to be pulling that into Express.
But first what we needed to do is essentially take some of the color stuff that we worked on the other day and then build it out into artboards. As you can see here, I have artboards for black logo, white logo, dark blue logo, lime green gray, and, like, light gray. So I've built these already out.
I've also added them to my libraries panel, and I've added my color palette to my library as well. But what we're going to do now is we're going to go straight into Exprs. So if you go to Express.Adobe.com,
you can start working with it. It works in your mobile, your device, your iPad. Anything you need, you can do it real quick.
So for those of you who don't know anything about Exprs, it is pretty much like, I think, one of the best of many, many tools. I think you get some of the greatest features from After Effects. You get them from photoshop.
You get them from InDesign. You get all these really cool features all in one space. Really awesome to use.
It's also free to use. So if you have a client who maybe doesn't have an Adobe Express account sorry, a Creative Cloud account, they can use it with the files and templates that you've built. But I will caveat that it is better with your Creative Cloud Express or with your Creative Cloud subscription.
When you use your Creative Cloud subscription, you get access to more images and stock assets than you would if you were just using a free account. So that's something to think about while you're working on this. This is the home page.
What we're going to do here very quickly is we're going to go to the brand section, and we're going to click Create a Brand. What I'm going to do here is actually upload our logos so I can pick a logo. Let me see if I can find it real quick.
Brand bootcamp, day five. And then I'm just going to choose the black logo upload that really quickly. I'm going to pick a color palette.
Let me grab the actual Hex value. Okay, perfect. I'm grabbing that from Illustrator.
Boom. Pick color and then copy paste that in here and then choose your font. So I want to add my own font.
You can also select from a bunch of these that are already within your Adobe account. But I'm going to click upload. We found a typeface that we wanted the other day titled Sans.
So I'm going to click all the versions of Untitled Sans and just pull them directly in. I'm clicking a button here that says we're going to be using this for this project. This is a test typeface from Klimp.
This is one of their testers. So I technically cannot use this for commercial uses or publishing it on my own until I've already licensed it. But for the sake of the demo, that's what I'm using it for right now.
But if I was going to post it for my own business or a company or whatever, I would get the licensing from it and use that for them. So choose your font. I already did that.
See if I can do it again. Oh, there we go. Sorry.
I'm going to choose the medium version of this. Boom. I'm going to type in halves, create my brand.
Perfect. I see people all talking about memes in Chat. We haven't done any memes or memes this whole week because we've been so busy hammering out this brand.
But more to come from that for sure. We did use Comic Fires very quickly the other day. All right, so I'm going to add some more colors in.
I can add additionals from my Illustrator. Just going to grab this again. Boom, boom.
More colors, copy, paste, boom. Add another 1 Gy. Boom.
So what I'm doing here is essentially just creating my swatches from my color palette, making sure that whenever I start to build brand templates and assets, I can quickly just bring it all in and not have to worry about it. There is a very special button, and I'll show it to you in a couple of minutes where I click a magic wand button and it literally makes everything look amazing and it brings it into your brand very quick. I'm also going to click more logos.
I'm going to add the same additional logos that I had from earlier. My Google Drive could be more quick. All right, brand boot camp, day five.
And then I'm going to just pull in all of the additionals. Oh, I can't do that. I have to do it one by one.
Do it one by one. Green. Cool.
And then I'm going to do off white. I can add more later. But for the sake of this, I'm just going to speed through it because I know we only have like very few minutes left.
These streams go so fast. All right, so we go back halves. We got our halves brand here.
I'm going to click and make default. So if you don't click and make default, then you're going to be working in a previous brand or previous project. You want to make sure that your brand that you're working on has that star in the lower left corner.
Very important note when you're working within these projects. So can go back to home. If you have no idea where to start, you can choose from one of these templates at the very top row.
You can use your Instagram story, a post, Facebook post, a poster. Any of these will be super helpful starting points. But for the sake of this project, I'm going to just choose to do an Instagram post.
I can also go up here and select from the drop down in the top left bar, and I can choose if I wanted to use it this way. So Instagram post, I can start from a blank canvas, or I can choose one that is already being populated. So really quickly, what I'll show you is just how this would look if we were to bring it in this is a template that has the crown icon.
Any of these crown icons in the left side on any of these assets. That means that your creative cloud subscription is necessary for it. So if you're on the free version, you won't be able to use anything with the crown on it.
But if you do, it's already there free for you to use. Boom. Now we're hiring people already.
It's crazy. We just built this brand and already looking for employees. What we're going to do here is I'm going to click this design button, this magic wand here, and I'm going to click Apply brand and it's going to shuffle it.
So now this is pulling from my brand that I've told it. I'm going to keep shuffling it, shuffling it. If I want to if I want to change colors or things like that, I can do that.
I can also go in here and then just change based off of my brand colors. So maybe I want it to really pop. Everybody knows that that's one of the favorite things that a client wants to ask for is make it pop.
So that's what we're going to do. Bright green. I want everybody to pay attention to this hiring ad.
I'm actually going to ungroup this. Ungroup this. I'm going to take out this logo.
I already have this logo here, but it's very small. Very small. So I'm going to adjust the size of this logo.
I can replace that if I want to with another image. I can also change the drop shadow. So what I'm going to do is look at these great different kind of like tools that you have for your effects on your lettering.
But you also have a section down here called Font Recommendations. And this will cycle through different fonts that are feeling similar to it. Based off of kind of the algorithm, I'm going to actually remove the drop shadow and I'm going to remove the outline.
But you have options. If you want to play with the shadow, you have angle of the shadow. You have the width or like depth of it.
You can play with that. You can also change the color. So maybe I want the drop shadow to be harsher, or maybe I just want it to be like white.
That could work too, but you have options with that. Play with it however I want. Boom.
Take that off. Show you the outline section as well. The outline is pretty easy to say.
It's really just the outline of the type that you have there. You can also make the type transparent. So if I wanted to just do a stroke width, I can do that.
And then I'll probably just do something black. Or I can do it as white type. White type could be kind of fun and fresh.
I keep that nice. What I don't like about this though, right now is the letter spacing letter spacing is controlling each of these elements. It's too big for me, so I wanted to lower that down from three to zero.
I can also get the line spacing closer as well. So I'm going to do both of those things. Maybe I feel like this needs to be all capped.
So maybe I'll just do that, retype it out, boom. And then I'll change out the line spacing again just so it's a little bit closer. Now it's big, feels very communicative.
But you have different options as well. So maybe I want to do something funky and fresh. With this global content reviewer section.
I've got the option to do a curved and it'll make just a circle of it. So I could put this like in a corner somewhere. Maybe I'm putting that there and I've got maybe this needs to just be black.
That could work. But now it feels unbalanced because I don't have this in that corner. Maybe this go like that.
So you have tons of options. I'm going to duplicate this just to show you the type tools that you have without necessarily needing this to be a long term solution. But here you go.
So type tool, you can do a semicircle or half circle. You can do up or down. You can also grid it.
That makes it sometimes very hard to makes it hard to read sometimes. So just be conscious of that. Whenever you're designing with this, you can play with the bounding boxes of it as well.
And it'll fit to the width. So just something to think about when you're working with it can create some really fun effects with it. This one's always one of my favorites that I typically go with as well.
It stacks and so you can see like it'll stack and match the full width. So depending on what I do, it changes. So I can put it one line.
I can put two lines, put it on three lines. Just something to think about as well. You have lots of options.
You also got this, I don't know the official word for it, but it does like a 90 degree rotate tool and you can kind of stack it around like that. Something like that could work. What else you got with the type tool? Pretty much type and shapes are going to be your go to.
So let's show maybe we'll make another piece. So we've got that we'll make this a now hiring. So I'll put get in touch.
I'm going to put hav.com. I don't know if this is a real website or not, but maybe it is. All right, I'm going to rotate this and make it just all black.
In touch. Boom. Cool.
So this is kind of an easy peasy one. I don't like how high it is actually. So let me just go through like a typical designer and just keep nudging things around.
I'm going to pull this down. Just kind of in the middle of the post. Now that feels a little bit more balanced.
Cool. So successful. We got one post done.
Let's hammer out another one. What we're going to do here is go to our project panel. We can also create a folder for this that's a great way of keeping your projects clean.
You can do that by going here into the top right and click Brand Boot Camp. And then I'm going to move it on to the Brand bootcamp folder by the move tool and not dragging it. Brand bootcamp, boom.
Move there. It's loading in. Tim says, magic text is great.
Helps to give you so many versions so quickly. That is absolutely true. So what I can do here is I can duplicate this and use that as a starting point for another post if I want to.
Or I can go into a new, let's say post and use a template again. Or I can start from scratch. But I'm going to start with just say like, actually I changed my mind.
Don't save. I'm going to go back to the Brand Boot Camp section and I'm going to duplicate this. I liked how bright and bold the background was.
We'll just keep it. Now hiring copy. But we'll probably change the name really quick.
Go in here and what I'm going to do is show you some fun things you can do. So I can go here into the photo section. I can search for anything.
Maybe I want to search like agency. That might be a thing. Yeah.
So there's like photos of people doing stuff and you can click it in there, use it for free. I've got my Creative Cloud subscription, so I can use any of these if I want. If I wanted to focus on maybe these people versus the content, I can make this bigger.
One of the things that I love about having such a clean geometric logo like this is that I can actually go in here and click the crop and shape button. So if I wanted to, I can freeform it. I can use original, I can use ratios that you might use in social or whatever.
Or I can use shapes. So I've got a circle shape, but I also have this beautiful half circle that matches my brand perfectly. Crazy.
So I've got that option so I can do something like this. And then maybe it says something like, now hiring can go in this section here and you can kind of play off of that so you can crop things really nicely. Let's see here.
I'm going to put some copy around like BR better half. And that could work. And I could put that shape maybe is like just rotate that.
I can put that there or something that feels very bad, actually. So I'm not going to do that. But in a perfect world, that would have been amazing.
First try. So cool. We've got these now hiring posters.
We got another half circle. We can start playing with this as well. So you have shapes.
One thing to remember is that in the shapes library, you have basic shapes and sometimes you get a lot of really great control. So this triangle is a great example. Some of these basic shapes come with a fill and they also come with a border.
So you can adjust either your fill or your border. You can have both. For example, let me put a gray so you can see you can have your stroked version or not.
That's super helpful for shaping things. It gives you a lot of control. You can also play with the thickness of it.
So you can really start making your own. This is almost like working in Illustrator. You're able to fix that thickness or not whenever you need it, which is great.
So if I wanted to, I'm going to replace a shape. Great thing is you can go in here and type it like half circle. And I have that option.
So I replaced it immediately. And now I can just change the border or the fill, and I've lowered the thickness on the border. And then I can play with this and kind of mess with kind of the shape language that we've got going on in this poster already and just click it and make it bigger.
Kind of cool. So we have this option. I'm going to look at the Layers tab.
In the bottom right of your screen, you have your Layers panel. You can drag and drop, and you can pull it below or above copy and Layers. So very much like a Photoshop or any other Adobe tool that you're used to.
So you have options with that. Shorten this type so you can play with it like that. Lots of options.
You can keep messing with this stuff all day, but I want to keep showing you other stuff. So we are going to go into got, like, five minutes. All right, what we're going to do is we're going to go to templates.
We're going to actually go to projects, create a new one. And then I'm going to show you, like, Instagram story, which is a different dimension, maybe. I like this this Mother's Day post again.
I'm going to click the Design tool, click my apply my brand. Don't really need the hearts. I'm going to delete that layer again.
Where are my hearts? Yes. One clicking in again and delete. All right, cool.
So happy Mother's Day. Awesome stuff. What we can do is we can go into this image, ungroup this image again.
All right. There's a couple of layers happening within that. That's totally great.
We can click the solid color. We can change it to our black or sorry, our gray. Change color again.
Go dark blue. Actually do dark blue up top and then the gray hide and then ungroup again. Lots of groups happening.
All right, so what you can do really quickly, if you already like this design, you say, we love XYZ about this. It's awesome. What you can do is essentially just go in and already start to change the layout.
You can resize things. So if you've loved the poster or this piece that you've done, you can just start moving it into maybe this is like a LinkedIn blog post image now. So you have the option of grouping everything together and making sure that it works directly for what you need.
You can also go in here and replace your image. You can upload images as well. So I'm going to go to my Bramboot camp, day four, and I'm going to grab some of these, like, 3D pieces.
Pretty cool. So I like that. I'm actually going to click that image and crop and shape and then free form going to adjust based off of that image.
I'm going to save it and then I'm going to back out. This has very quickly gone from a Mother's Day card into a very abstract card. And that's totally fine.
Kind of the beauty of working within Express is how quickly you can hammer out new content or new pieces. Maybe I want to replace this image with something else later on. That's totally fine.
You have this option. Happy Mother's Day. I can align things.
So whenever you start to grab multiple options by shift clicking them, you can align to your horizontal. You can also align vertically if you need to. You have lots of different options in the templates folder.
You can also search for different keywords. So maybe I want to type in, like, skate. Maybe there's like a skate thing.
There's like a skateboarder thing. Yeah. This is cool.
So I'm going to go with this create from this template, and it's going to open that up for us. Skate Life 2020. It is 2022.
So I'm going to update that really quickly. Boom. Nailed it.
Now what we're going to do is essentially just take this and apply our brand to it as well. Boom. So we got things happening.
I want this to be brighter. I want this to be white. Click this and this.
Now with these X shapes that are happening here, it's starting to feel kind of like X Games, which is exciting. I'm just going to make this pure white. I'm going to change Skate Life 2022 because the skateboarder in me will not let me just leave that.
Just like that. Join us Sept 15th Venice. Cool.
So you can just quickly go in there, type in whatever copy you need, and then you have this ability to just quickly spin it up. I'm going to take off the shape bouncing box of it. We're going to use our Grid tool, the magic tool.
Sorry. Use untitled. Sarah sans.
Boom. Perfect. Bold.
Sweet. So really quickly you can see how we've already generated an instagram story that you can already download. What you can do here is you download it both as a PNG, A, JPEG or PDF.
This is super helpful. If you are making a poster, so say that we love this image so much, we can quickly resize it, go into print, and then we can do a poster letter size, whatever you need. So if I wanted to put this out as flyers around the city just by clicking that, because it was already a very similar dimension, it has allowed me to just be ready to print this.
It's already kind of centered correctly. It's already aligned. It was a similar dimension already, so it makes iterating so fast.
This is a time saver. Even if you're the most experienced designer, it makes it super easy and simple for you. Annika says you're so good at copywriting.
This is brilliant. Thank you. Thank you for the compliment.
I appreciate it. Yeah. So we're pretty much there with the last minute.
I want to give you a quick, quick recap. Express is awesome. I love working at Express.
I hope that this has been a really good tutorial for you all to quickly spin up and build new collateral within that system. We have been through five days, which is crazy. Time has flown by so fast.
Five days from your initial brand strategy to your mood boarding and logo creation into shape language for it, your type, collateral, Express, everything. I hope this has been as helpful for you as it has been for me. I have had a great time.
Packaging design comes up next week with Nick Longo. I believe that's a boot camp as well. So that's super exciting.
Nick is a brilliant, talented, crazy talented man. He does lots of great packaging. Also a California native thing.
I'm just going to make up stories about him. He's awesome. He's mythical, he's legendary.
We will see y'all shortly. I can't wait to see you all soon. Thank you all for hanging out for the last five days.
If you missed any of the recaps, go check them out on YouTube or Behance. We'll see you all soon. Thank you so much.
Bye.
