Set up your brand

- [Instructor] Setting up your brand inside Adobe Creative Cloud Express is super easy, and not only will this process help you with your productivity, it's going to ensure that you maintain brand consistency throughout your content so you won't have to redefine your fonts, your colors, or your logos, and this is especially crucial when you have teams or other collaborators who are helping you create content. So to set up a brand, you need to be on the desktop browser. We're going to click on brands and you're going to see a similar window to mine. So I have several other brands that I have managed here, so we're going to just go through step by step on how you can create your own brand. So I'm going to click on create a brand. Next, you'll see a very easy to follow prompt that guide you through the process. So the first thing we want to do is upload our logo, and I have a few brand marks that I want to use, so I'm going to go into my asset files, brand marks, and I'm going to select my primary brand mark. Once I select that, now you can actually see a really neat preview for some of these graphics that you could potentially use and this is a really great reference point to see how this can be easily applied. The next step is to pick your color. Here's a little magic trick that I love. When you select pick your color, it automatically pulls some of the colors that you have so you can click on save. Now let's click on save, but you'll see here how it pulls in one of the other colors that really isn't my primary color. You can click on this edit icon here, it looks like a little pencil, and you can select one of these colors here from the logo. So once you click on save, then it'll go in and automatically change the preview so you can see which would be one of your primary colors for your brand. Then you can select a font. So, there are a couple options that you can use. If you have a licensed font, meaning that you can use this on an online version for both print and web, then you can upload your licensed font as long as there is no restrictions to where you can upload it. Upload that or then you can select some of the options that you currently have here for your primary font. So, for instance, we're going to start with something simple. Let's just use Futura Medium and click on next. Next step is to give this a name. So I am going to give this Zapotej2 because I already have one, but you want to get a little more straightforward with your brand. I just want to guide you through this process. Now, you see this window pop up where you can actually add more logos, define more colors, and define your fonts a little bit further. So, we can click on this plus icon here and I want to add a couple of logos. So this one here is a default and you can click on the three icons over here, the three little dots, and you can go ahead and delete it, and sometimes it might tell you that it's used on one brand surface or that it's used on a template. So, it won't allow you to delete that. One way to do that is to just replace it. So you can click on replace logo and upload one of your other logos or brand marks that you can use. Then I click on replace, and it's going to replace wherever that instance of that mark was used, and now it's part of my logos. I want to upload one last one which is my icon, and those are great. Now I can move forward to defining my brand colors. So we're going to click on the plus icon here. So right now we only have one brand color. Now there are a couple of ways that you can approach this. I recommend using your actual hex colors so this is where you would input your values for your hex colors. There's also the option where you can just drag here and look for a value that is pretty close to your brand. I don't recommend this because you want to make sure that you are consistent with your branding. And then you can click on save. For now, I'm just going to do that for this time being, and once I click on save, then you see these colors pop up here. Now what's going to happen is as you add these colors, you'll be able to use them interchangeably whenever you're working on your design. So that's why it's really important for you to add your primary palette, your secondary, or if you had any other colors that you use throughout your collateral, this is where you add it. Now let's say you change a value from some of your colors. You can click on this, go to the three dots, and you can click on replace, and then that's when you can actually write your hex values. So that's really helpful in case there is a change to your branding. This is the way to do that. Next is the fonts. So we set up the header, which is Futura Medium, and then you can select what you want for the body text. So, I mentioned earlier that there are some limits as far as what is on the baseline of what we can select for the fonts. So there isn't that many options. Ideally, if you can upload your font, that's great 'cause then you have full control. As of now, we can't access Adobe Fonts in this particular brand setup. But throughout this course, I will show you how you can leverage templates to ensure that you're using the same font that you would need for your branding. So you can select any font essentially here that is as close as possible to your branding, and then click on replace. That way, it's going to make sure that anytime you create a template or a graphic, it uses those particular fonts. Like I mentioned, we'll be able to redefine them if you need to use one of the actual Adobe Fonts. That's the way to do it. Otherwise, you can upload your fonts, and if you need another additional font, you can click on this plus icon and you'll be able to upload them over here where it says add your fonts. Now, I won't go into a deep detail about this particular area, but there are two components that are a part of brand which is Page and Video. So these are still called Spark Page and Spark Video. If you want to create easy videos using Spark Video which you can use the web and their app, you can do so. These three areas here that you see on both Video and Page are essentially brand setups for different types of content. So if I wanted to create, let's say, a one page website which is Spark Page, I can edit these sections. So there's a light, a medium, and dark. And that's typically what you will see by default. So if I click on that, I'm able to actually edit the page theme a little further. So I'll be able to define how the background images are looked, some of the titles, what colors they are. So this is where it's really helpful if I was to select the title, defining the brand colors. So, as you add all your brand colors, they would be all accessible over here, and you can just easily select it. Just make sure that whatever color you're using for your text isn't hard to read with your background. You want to make sure that there's legibility. So this is how you can easily set them up, and as you scroll down, you'll be able to see how you can create headings, how it's formatted, and the links, your buttons, and so this is a really, really great way to leverage brand consistency. If you don't have a website or you want to create a website for a campaign, this is a really great tool to use to help you expand your brand and really keep everything consistent and cohesive. So I'm just going to click on done, but this is something that I highly recommend that you set up. You can also define what background colors you want for each of these elements. So there is a level of modification that you can apply for all of these themes. The same thing goes for video. So those are a couple elements that I really wanted to outline for you guys to not forget about setting your brands because you'll be able to leverage it in the future. And this last little section here allows you to personalize how your logo and tagline are displayed. So this is a really great way for you to go into each of these elements and select a particular logo or a particular tagline. So for instance, the stamp and the outro, these are all part of your Spark Video components, so it'll allow you to select whatever logo you want to use for that particular area. So you'll be able to select whichever logo you want to appear in this corner section, the same thing for any video outros, your logo for your general content, and for the Spark Page. This is the area where you can define what logo you want to use for the header and the footer. So there's this really powerful, powerful setup as you can create your own brand using Creative Cloud Express. Once you have your brand set up, this is where the content creation magic happens because you're able to stay consistent and cohesive. So, if any of these elements ever change, you can go back, change your logos, update your logos, update your fonts, your colors, and you don't have to send a hundred different emails telling people to use this latest design or latest logo.