Have a Look at Adobe Express

Once upon a time, there was this thing called Adobe Express. Then it vanished to be replaced by something else. Which got replaced by something else. See a pattern? Then there was Adobe Spark. Then Spark was gone, and replaced by the reincarnation of Adobe Express. In classic Adobe style, it’s naming is confusing and so is its purpose. I’d like to try to help with that.

Adobe Express is free to anyone to use at express.adobe.com However if you are any kind of Creative Cloud subscriber, you get more services and functions and since so many people subscribe to the Photographer’s Bundle, that’s the approach I will take.

Adobe has not, in my opinion, done a great job of educating on Express. I will give credit to my friend and instructor extraordinaire Mr. Scott Kelby who clears the miasma in his KelbyOne course on Express. You can join kelbyone by clicking on the link if you are not already a member.

Fundamentally, Adobe Express builds web pages. Where it really shines is in how it can build components of webpages, such as logos, and use your photos and videos as part of the page. In the course of doing so, Express also has a bunch of templates to make the creation of elements simple. Consider for example a logo. You can buy a logo maker, or you can use the ton of templates that Express offers to make on. You can create and export the logo as an image if you wish, but you can also use it as an element on a page. You can make a flyer for your group, team or community organization. You can certainly export the flyer, but also use it as a page. The same thing is true for a menu or YouTube upload or Instagram story. Most importantly each page you make can have a link so you do not need to reprogram or design for a specific platform, you can simply put the link on the platforms that you choose and those who click the link will be redirected to your creation on Adobe Express. Adobe provides the hosting for your Express creations when you make them a link. In Adobe’s reveal, this was not communicated well from my perspective whereas Scott Kelby takes you through creating a complex page to document a trip with photos, text and buttons.

For those who have ever used Squarespace, Express uses a very similar block structure. There is no coding required. You lay things out as you like, and when you make a change to a page or pages, any links that you share keep your viewers seeing only the current stuff.

When I first spent time with Express it was to create an updated logo for my camera club, and I have to be honest that I had some issues at first. Express is a service delivered via the web so fixes and enhancements are available as Adobe updates the Express platform. You don’t have to download anything or install anything to be sure that you are current when you log in to Express. I see this as a tangible benefit because it eliminates a lot of the limitations that are foisted upon us when our perfectly useful computer cannot run the latest OS and so we are limited in terms of the functionality that we can use. As my computers are not new and still work perfectly everyday, knowing that all but one cannot advance forward to the latest or soon to be released OS and and therefore won’t be able to run any software dependent on that OS makes me very angry. I consider these actions customer hostile and that’s why I tend to prefer web apps when they make sense.

Within Express you can have multiple projects. You can also create “brands” very useful if you want to separate work based on where it will be used. For example, I might have a Photo Video Guy brand, and a separate brand for my image work. Express also leverages your existing Creative Cloud libraries and allows you to make new libraries of elements available across all the Creative Cloud applications.

Express also includes a number of quick actions that simplify element creation without needing other software including tools to make GIFs, or MP4s or do image manipulation including background removal, resizing and cropping, all inside the Express UI.

I have to admit that at first, I really didn’t see the point, because Adobe’s messaging focused on creating social media content. Since I don’t do Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or any of those things, I wondered why I should bother, and to be blunt, without Scott’s basic class I probably would not have bothered to go farther.

In addition to web pages, you can also take your work to make a PDF or even generate a QR code to take users to your Express page. If you ever tried the old Spark Pages, you will see that Express is so much more than Spark was.

There are tutorials on the Express site and they are good “how to do this thing” work but from an overview perspective, it lacks a lot.

Users can purchase Express on its own, but you get the Pro version as part of the Photographer’s Bundle. I have included graphics of the two plans. There’s a lot of value add-ons in the packages

I do think that Adobe has done a lousy job promoting Express but I also think it is absolutely work the time investment to check it out.

Thanks for reading, be sure to subscribe to be notified on new posts. Until next time, peace.