Adobe Spark has been the brand’s relatively recent jump into a range of both online and mobile products that make it easy for anyone to create well-designed content including videos, web pages, and graphics. For creatives that fancy themselves better image creators than designers of promotional flyers or small web experiences or for DIY small business owners, Adobe Spark hopes to fill in the gaps and make it both easy and fast to design range of content types for your business. Today, Adobe released some much needed updates that mark the start of what Spark always should have been.
First, Spark projects no longer have to be branded as such. For any Creative Cloud members, including those with a new $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year Spark plan, Adobe Spark branding no longer appears on content created with the otherwise free tools. In its place, you can add your own branding in a number of ways. This step was always needed before Spark could really be taken seriously. And now it’s here.
Perhaps more importantly in terms of functionality, however, today’s Spark updates also introduced some great features to help save time and apply a uniform brand experience across content created with the web or mobile applications. In addition to being able to add your own logo, Spark will pull colors from the logo and automatically populate a variety of complimentary color palettes that you can use across your projects. Any color, set of colors, logo, or multiple logos can be edited and updated later in one step, after which all the uses of those assets will update across the entire project.
Your logo and color palettes will build directly into Spark’s library of templates so you can see what everything from "thank you" notes and business cards to Twitter posts and video themes might look like with your brand’s twist. Spark will even suggest font pairings to aid in the selection of a secondary font throughout the template library.
The magic moment really happens with the new Brandify feature. Simply click Brandify to apply your brand’s look to any template. Continue clicking to cycle through different variations of palettes and, subsequently, varying moods or feelings that all complement your brand.
Spark is currently available for free for those that don’t mind the Adobe branding. But other businesses or those already considering a Creative Cloud subscription can subscribe to Spark alone for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. While the discounted yearly price makes sense for those looking only for Spark, it isn’t much more to get the Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom, CC, and Spark, too, for just a little more at $119.99 per year or at the same monthly cost. In either case, the monthly plan, of course, requires no annual commitment. Spark Video, Spark Page, and Spark Post are all available as separate smartphone applications or online through a browser.
It would be super if they could incorporate these stories with Behance as the blogging feature it lacks, and even for Muse. That's the main drawback from these platforms, no access to stories (blog posts) unless you link out to WordPress or Tumblr.