Class Introduction
Lesson 1 from: Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts In a SnapKhara Plicanic
Class Introduction
Lesson 1 from: Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts In a SnapKhara Plicanic
Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
How many of you guys are sitting at home thinking I am finally, today is the day that you're gonna up your social media game. I feel like I tell myself that all the time. (laughs) Today, right now, you're gonna finally up your game. You need to build that community, you maybe need to generate leads, you wanna position your brand, but building graphics can take a long time or maybe you don't know how to use Photoshop or any other graphics kind of program. Maybe you're not a designer so it can be overwhelming. Or maybe you are a designer but you just, it can take time to launch Photoshop and dig into all of that. Whatever your situation, I'm here to help with your social media and graphic needs and today, we're gonna be talking about Adobe Spark and what is so cool about Adobe Spark is that it is free. So it's gonna help you create beautiful graphics, web pages, and video stories literally in minutes. It's so easy to use and it's fun. It's very fluid I would say and what's nice is it emp...
owers anyone to be creative on the web or on your mobile, and like I said, it's free. So what can you create with Adobe Spark? Well, they have three general flavors I should say of content that you can create. You can create posts, videos, and pages, and what is the most interesting thing is that those are like the very broad category, okay? Posts, videos, and pages, but what could that really be? Well, a post for example is any sort of graphic so that could be a poster. Maybe you need to make a poster for an event that's coming up and you just don't wanna get into Photoshop so you can actually make a Spark post that you output as a poster. Maybe you need to make a book cover or an info graphic, those are very trendy these days and maybe you're just not into doing all of that in Illustrator or Photoshop, so you can do it in Spark. So that's a look at some post ideas. Video, you can make instructional videos, you can make promotional videos for your business, you could create a slideshow. The possibilities are pretty endless and then of course with pages, you could use that to create a presentation, you could turn it into a blog post, it could be a photo journal or it could be a landing page for a campaign you're working on. So there's a lot of different things that you can make with just three styles of what they call stories, okay? So a story can be a post, a video, or a page and as I mentioned, you can create all of this on the desktop via their website, so spark.adobe.com, or if you prefer to work on your mobile, there are mobile apps. So the different types of content that can be created, the post, video, and page, each one has its own app. So download all three or if you wanna focus on video or whatever, get that one, but they're all free and readily available. So in this class, we're gonna be focusing on creating it through the desktop, but you can do all of this stuff in the mobile apps as well, so you can still be creative when you're on the go. So like I said, this is free. Adobe Spark is free to use. Of course, if you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, you get access to some cool bonus features. So we're gonna be taking advantage of that and creating some branding for our project. So the branding that we're gonna be making is for a fictitious party planning company that I've created for this class called Party Panache. (laughs) So if anyone's looking for a business concept out there, I've got one for you complete with branding. So Party Panache, I've made them a couple of little logos, so I'm gonna show you how as a subscriber, you can take it one step further and save yourself time, so instead of having to manually build something to look like your brand, you can upload the logos and then Spark just intelligently does it for you and it's really cool and you can even remix it and get different versions for variety and it's actually pretty cool. So I've made these logo files. We've got a color one and a black and white one. These come with the course so you can follow along step by step and do the things that we are doing in class. So once we upload the logos, we're also going to choose the colors for our brand and Spark's gonna help us out by automatically generating them from our logos but I'll show you how you can add to that as well. And the other thing that Spark does is it's really good at providing a lot of different font opportunities, font options and, excuse me, automatically suggesting font pairings, which is really nice 'cause a lot of times, people get paralyzed a little bit like, I don't know what goes with what. So font helps with all of that and one of the newer features with Spark is that you can also upload custom fonts. So if you have your own brand font, you don't wanna just use one of their collection, you can actually upload your own font and use that as well. So again, that all comes as a bonus to Creative Cloud subscribers, but I'm gonna start today with just a generic post that anybody can make for free. So we'll get to learn a little bit of everything. Then we're gonna dive in and I'll show you how easy it is once you upload your logo and stuff to create some branding, so we'll make a different social post for Instagram, something fun for Party Panache, and then we're gonna take it through actually like a campaign. So we're gonna be creating three elements. We're gonna be creating a post and I'm gonna show you how easy it is to create a single post and then Spark will actually export it to all the different sizes that you need for Pinterest or Facebook and I don't know how much you know about all of this, but Facebook has different sizes whether it's a cover like for your profile or it's an ad or it's an inline graphic or, they all have different sizes and trying to keep track on your own of the constantly changing sizes and formats for all the different social media platforms is like a full time job by itself and luckily with Spark, you don't have to do that, so they have all of that and it's always dynamic. Spark is always changing, they're always adding new features and it's just really cool. It's very fluid and because it lives in the cloud, it's all sort of like alive all the time and it's just, it's very cool. So I'll show you how easy it is to take a post and then format it for different things. Then we're gonna create a little promo video for our gals at Party Panache. It's got three co-founders, one of them is Vanessa here so I'm gonna show you how to create a little just quick who are we, what are we about promo video without having any actual video clips, which (laughs) is a nice feat. So we'll just make something really simple and we're gonna connect it to our social post in a minute, so I guess if I back up here quick, so this post that we're gonna make is how to make the perfect cocktail. So we'll create the imagery to promote that post, then we're gonna create this little intro video and then we're gonna create the actual web page that has the sort of tutorial about how to make the perfect cocktail and we're gonna connect it all, right, because having all of the social media stuff, it's all about making connections, getting engagement, and giving people value. So we're gonna be teaching them how to make the perfect cocktail and we will present it to them by making these social posts, generating a link that will take them to the web where they'll get the tutorial and at the bottom of the tutorial, they will see the video that we make which will promote their brand and hopefully generate some leads for them. So we've kind of thought through that whole circuit. So we'll tie it all together and I'll show you how that works. And of course, all the course files are included with this course, so if you wanna follow along, you can join me step by step. You wanna download the folder with all of the design assets and different images and things that we'll be using and then you'll be ready to go and of course, last but not least, I want to let you know where you can reach me, kharaplicanic.com and all on social media at kplicanic, so I wanna see the things you make. Tag me and let me know what you found most helpful.
Class Materials
Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts in a Snap - Adobe Stock Contributor Tutorial
Adobe Spark: Create Engaging Social Media Posts in a Snap - Course Files
Ratings and Reviews
Leah
Khara is an upbeat presenter with a fantastic overview of Spark that showed me just how useful this program will be for my business!