Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Adobe Spark has a range of functionality for design. From infographics to web pages, digital portfolios, slideshow videos and social media posts. All of these elements are fantastic for building assets for education and for student demonstration of knowledge.

When adding assets to a Spark webpage that are designed in Spark, you must first download the item as an image (infographics, social media posts, menus, posters, etc) before adding them to the Adobe Spark webpage. If it had a drag and drop function it would be very convenient.

The software is simple, and easy to use. Upon logging in, I was able to go through a bunch of prebuilt templates, establish my brand identity (colors, upload fonts, logos, etc.) and begin creating graphics.

I am a huge fan of the interface, and I enjoy the extraordinarily powerful background-remover tool. It is almost always accurate, and causes graphic creation to be quite simple.

There's a button called, "Brandify" which will automatically insert your colors, logo, and fonts into the picture you've created (or the template you've grabbed) which makes for very quick creation/editing of graphics.

I primarily use CC Express for social media graphics, and I'll say that I personally think that they're better than their competitor, Canva. Both offer nearly the same tools, and Canva is just a little bit simpler, but CC Express is cheaper by a bit ($100 for a year subscription vs. Canva's $120). But the reason I prefer CC Express to Canva is that it integrates with the Adobe suite in small quality of life things that make using this software with other products very easy and compatible.

There's really only two things I dislike about this software.

First off, it has video editing capabilities. The video editing is primarily for social media graphics, though you can do some full-blown video editing. The thing is, most people likely have this product through the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. If you do, you might as well use Premiere Rush or Premiere Pro, which are Adobe's video editors. Rush is a more powerful version than the one within Express, yet a simpler version of Pro. I don't see a use for the video editing when it's already in it's other products.

The load times can be horrendous. Most of the time I have no issues, but when I do have a loading issue, it can take minutes (the longest I've waited is 10 minutes to log in). This is rare, but it's always extremely inconvenient when it does happen. Also, if you're editing something and then your internet "hiccups" and connection changes for any reason, a popup will occur and tell you to refresh the page. Since the software saves automatically as you make edits, this generally isn't an issue. Though, occasionally, it will lose progress after a refresh, and you'll have to redo some work.

I love the ease of use and the variety of posts you can make using the software. I use the software to create and manage posts for my own brand and for a client and it's easy to switch between two branded templates and to keep everything connected and uniform. I love the stock libraries and the ability to import logos, fonts, images to keep everything exactly as you want it.

I feel the video templates could be improved or updated, they don't feel helpful for creating modern content, the same with the animation features. I would like more control or options in those areas.