Adobe has been steadily moving from huge installed apps like Photoshop to a more web- and mobile-based app strategy, as evidenced by today's launch of Adobe Creative Cloud Express.
The new offering provides thousands of highly customizable templates that can be instantly applied to a user's own media. The whole idea is to let professional and nonprofessional creators produce social media-friendly, distinctive content for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
The product offers "incredible levels of customization" and uses Adobe Sensei AI for much of its magic and simplification, said Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky.
Creative Cloud Express not only offers templates but also stock images from Adobe Stock. Searching for content and templates streamlines getting relevant assets. The service also allows for collaboration among multiple users through libraries, project syncing, and shared templates.
To accelerate content creation, Express lets users define a brand—with consistent colors and typefaces—to reuse on new projects. Users can easily output content in formats specifically optimized for the social media outlets.
In its announcement event, Adobe recruited several non-designers with products to sell, showing how they could create distinctively designed content to reflect their unique identities. Among these were 49ers tight end George Kittle and Momofuku restaurateur David Chang.
For those familiar with Adobe's longtime free photo editor, Photoshop Express, this new offering is completely separate. Another similar preexisting tool is Adobe Spark, which had similar intentions. Adobe execs answering questions at the online unveiling noted that Express is a natural evolution from those previous efforts. A glance at the included Adobe Creative Cloud apps no longer lists Spark, so it seems that Express has replaced it.
Adobe has already created several tutorial videos on how to create different types of media using Express, as you can see in the Adobe for Education video showing how to create a video using the new service.
Express is free to use, with a premium version at $9.99 per month. It's available on the web and in the Apple App Store, Google Play, and the Microsoft Store.