Since its launch last year, Adobe Spark has been an alternative, mobile-friendly solution to using Adobe’s powerful editing and creation software for free — without resorting to piracy. While Spark remains free to use, today Adobe is adding a new paid feature to help small businesses create branded media content.
Adobe’s free visual storytelling tool Spark adds premium features
To help small businesses with branding and marketing
To help small businesses with branding and marketing
The feature, called Branded Stories, lets you make graphics, web pages, and video stories. You can set one consistent template or theme to be present across every piece of media. Adobe lets you easily lets you change a font or color throughout all of your creations and templates at once, while notifying you of how many places are being changed. Adobe Spark only offers a small selection of fonts, like Calluna, Raleway, and the very Pinterest-friendly Wanderlust Shine. It also offers font suggestions to pair your selected typeface with another that Adobe thinks is aesthetically complementary.
The mobile app and website load relatively quickly considering how much content is being shown. Though the app is a simplified versions of their feature-filled (and expensive) software cousins, it offers intuitive choices in cropping, animating, and coloring your chosen illustration. Content creators can easily upload creations onto Instagram and the designer-friendly Behance after they’re finished editing.
Branded Stories will likely be useful for those who prefer to get hands-on with their marketed material, or are active on social media and video platforms. “We see Spark as a complementary solution to anybody who’s creating a webpage,” Adobe says. Still, if you’re running a single site with Squarespace or Wix, you probably won’t need to pay the extra $9.99 monthly (or $99.99 annually) expense to have personalized graphics. While the tool is beautiful and easy to use, for many existing Spark users, the perk was being able to edit content for free.
Spark’s Branded Stories is available on iOS today. Adobe says the feature should arrive on Android soon, but it hasn’t yet set a date.
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