Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Adobe Spark Post is a free online design interface for quickly creating crowd-pleasing social media graphics. A previous article — Quickly Create Attention-Grabbing Social Media Graphics with Adobe Spark Post — provides step-by-step guidance on using Post to design and use custom graphics. But you can take your memes even further with Spark Post’s creative and fun inspiration tools for text. Here are some tips on how to easily transform your social graphic’s message into something snazzy that leaves a lasting impression, giving a brand-recognition boost to your social media posts.
If you closed out of Adobe Spark, the graphic you were working on was automatically saved. You can find it in the My Projects page. If that isn’t the first screen you see when you log into Spark and open Post, then click on My Projects in the menu at the top of your screen. In the next screen, click on the thumbnail of the graphic you wish to edit.
In the workspace screen that opens up, go to the menu in the upper right corner and click on Palette.
Adobe is famous for its products’ understanding of color, and it provides predefined palettes of colors that work well together. The five-color bar at the top of the right sidebar is the palette currently being used for your graphic. You know it’s the currently selected palette because of the shuffle icon: the two crossed arrows. Click on that palette to see its colors reshuffled in your graphic, changing the colors of your font and text box background. Keep clicking until you like the combination.
Click on a different color palette. You’ll notice that not only does that change your text more dramatically; it also alters the overall hue of your background image to better fit in with the new text colors.
In upper right menu, click on Text. That opens up all the other text options in the right sidebar, and automatically places a bounding box around your text. That box is not part of your graphic; it is simply a tool for moving and manipulating your text box. (The box disappears when you leave the Text editing mode.)
Click and drag on any of the corners of the bounding box to resize or reshape it.
Click and drag inside the text box to move it elsewhere in your graphic.
Click and drag on the rotation icon (the lollipop icon dangling from the bottom middle of the bounding box) that rotates the text box.
In the sidebar is a green ball within a black ring. For fun and inspiration, click and drag on that green ball to move it around the ring. Each time you move the ball, Adobe redraws the text box with new design elements. To view one of the designs the tool produced a moment ago, move the ball in the opposite direction. If you want to return to your original design, click Cancel.
If you wish to add another block of text, click on the Add Text icon at the top of the sidebar, or simply click within your graphic and choose Add Text from the bar that pops up.
Either opens a nearly blank screen with a blinking cursor. Type your text and click Save.
Your new text block appears in your graphic, using the same style and color you applied to your original text. However, it doesn’t have any rotation applied.
Use the corner and rotation handles of the new text’s bounding box to resize and rotate it to fit in nicely with your previous text. As before, click and drag inside the bounding box to move it.
The result is a snazzy graphic with an eye-catching meme and a website address so people know where to go for additional interesting and useful information.
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