Adobe allows you to easily promote your business or project through images, webpages and videos for free – if you don’t mind some limitations.
Last time we looked at Adobe Spark, it was a service that had recently merged three Adobe properties: Adobe Post, Adobe Slate and Adobe Voice. They were then known as Adobe Spark Post, Adobe Spark Page, and Adobe Spark Video respectively. Although you can still access apps bearing these manes for your mobile or tablets, the web version of the service has received a major overhaul. This service is part of Adobe, but you don’t actually need a Creative Cloud account and therefore don’t need to fork out a monthly subscription in order to use this service – well there’s a proviso to this (more on that later). However, you do need to login somehow which you can do using your Google, Facebook or Apple accounts, or just your email if you prefer. Teachers and students have a separate login option. Once you’ve created an account, you’re graced with your front page. From there, you’re offered a series of templates, depending on where your project is destined for: an Instagram story or a post, a Facebook post, a photo collage, a presentation, a slideshow, or a custom sized project, for instance. Mouse over each thumbnail though and you’ll see the three original options are still very much present: graphic, web page, and video, depending on which Spark you’ll be creating. The whole concept is there to make content creation as easy and as quick as possible for those who need to advertise and promote their work but don’t have the time nor the skill to do this. We’ll look at each in turn. Select any graphic option and you’re greeted with a good number of templates to choose from. This is where you may encounter a bit of a pickle: not all templates are available for free. Any with a little yellow tag top right of the thumbnail can only be accessed if you have a Creative Cloud subscription. What’s annoying is that this yellow tag isn’t immediately obvious when scrolling through brightly coloured templates, and they’re sprinkled throughout the list – they’re not sorted between free, and paid for. However, there are still a good number of free templates to work with should you wish to remain in the free section. Once you’ve made your selection, this is where the fun begins. The template is fully customisable. You can obviously select any text box and alter the wording – that’s a given – but you also have access to dozens of fonts, alter the spacing, and have resize and rotate options. There’s a handy representation of all the layers that make up your creation, making it easy to see what’s on each and to alter their order, and as there’s also an Opacity slider, you have the ability to make selected objects semi-transparent.
