Adobe Express: Graphic Design Ratings and Reviews

Worth my time

Yes, I like this app enough to take my personal time and scratch out a review! It’s worth it. Most things “Adobe” are. (Except that awful camera app) 🤷‍♀️ This one is super easy to use and learn as you go. No need for tutorials and classes to get going on your project. It’s like a super power packed mini version of their overwhelming and difficult to navigate regular apps. It has enough features to create amazing stuff, without being totally confusing and off putting. I just jumped right in and spent time having fun with my creativity.. the flyer I made came out unbelievably perfect. It didn’t take forever since the commands to get each little detail and elements of all types into a look your happy with, seem to be very obvious and extremely difficult to mess up. Plus there is the well love “back button” for any mistakes that are made. It’s really a fun and useful app! I’ve made slides for a presentation, created a flyer, insta posts, Face Book posts- it has all the preset sized canvases for each platform, so no guessing or research necessary. Alright, enough of this- they should pay me!!! Lol. Get it! It’s a dream.😁

Loving it so far, but...

Loving the app so far having experience with many design projects. Really creates a peace of mind when needing to run through multiple iterations of a design because you know what you want once you see it, and not having to stop the creative flow to draft new thumbnail mock-ups, grab more paper, or even shuffle through needed layers.

Literally the only problem I’ve ran across multiple times is when saving the file size even at the recommended dimensions for any content I decide to post on social media it results in a pixelated image on the desktop version while appearing clear and crisp on the mobile versions. I’ve tried uploading the image that gets saved directly to camera phone and then viewing it on the desktop version and it still comes out pixelated and not as crisp. And just for comparison I also tried saving the finished project directly to google drive and then downloading the image on a desktop and then uploading the image from the social site on the desktop and yet the Image still resulted in the same quality. At the moment it has been only good to design for smaller screen content. As it seems the resizing feature doesn’t seem to actually effect the resolution even though the info on the desktop changes, when you need to scale a design up for desktop view. Still giving a 4 though.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback regarding image quality. We are constantly making changes to improve image quality generated from Post iOS and web. Could you reach out to us at hellopost@adobe.com so we can see how we can improve image quality to match your use case? Thanks! Spark Post Team

Beautiful typography; kludgy to use

Posted my first attempt with Spark to Facebook, tried an animation with a fairly subtle zoom-out effect that looked very nice, but on Facebook the video kept looping repeatedly—it was about 3 seconds long. I found that there were limited options with text, with font point size missing altogether. (Most would agree that’s a pretty basic function, one would think.) You could change the relative size of text by enlarging or reducing the size of a text box or adjusting line spacing, but these were pretty awkward and unpredictable ways of doing so.) I wanted to italicize the title of the book from which I was quoting, but couldn’t find a simple way of doing that either—even though the font I used had a designed italic, I found I could not mix the two in the same sentence, after repeated tries of selecting and trying to format individual words.

That said, the font selection was very good and quite tasteful, making any post created in Spark deliciously gorgeous and a cut above any typical meme-maker. As I mentioned in my post, I found the placement of the Adobe Spark logo at the bottom intrusive and lacking in subtlety or nuance. This needs to be addressed—I am not using the software primarily to create ads for Adobe. Still, because it can produce such beautiful results, I’m giving Spark four stars out of five.

Almost perfect

Typically I’m too proud to do anything the easy way. I sometimes feel that if I didn’t build something completely from scratch, I didn’t build anything at all. But Spark Post helps me to work smarter, not harder—to feel that using intelligent design tools doesn’t make me less creative, but instead helps me to clarify and realize my vision faster. It helps me to focus my energy on making better content instead of on unnecessarily fussing over the presentation of a simple social media post that will disappear in 24 hours and that is meant to communicate a message rather than be my magnum opus.

The only thing about Spark Post that disappoints me is that, in its attempt to make things easy and auto-intelligent, there are certain key features missing for those of us who like more control. For example, paragraph styles and spacing don’t exist—you need to create a new text box. Resizing text boxes forces the text, the shape, and the border to resize together rather than allowing you to alter each style independently. This makes matching text boxes difficult. To make more precise edits, I could take my graphic into Illustrator—but the point of Spark Post is one-stop editing for quick and easy social media posts. It would be nice to be able to get under the hood of your design with more advanced options.

Remove background request for shadows

Apri 2022: Thank you for the reply. Yes, the new version with more quality stock photos is much better. Previously, if you held down on the photo it would appear larger to see more detail. This would be an excellent to add that feature back in. And, please, please add a drop shadow to the remove background. I use this app all the time and it’s great I can pick right up on my last edits on my computer.

Dec 2021: Removing the free stock uses right before the holidays is a mean grinch thing to do! Ugh!!! Post was my go to app for quick social marketing, and what am I getting for the price now? Very frustrating and disappointed. Edit: Still hoping Adobe will add drop shadow to the Remove Background option to make this a Five Star rating. Each upgrade keeps getting better and better. I find I use Spark often for quick editing on my phone. The remove background works really well, except sometimes for objects with any white near corners it grabs too much of the object. Otherwise, it works great on other colors. The ability to add or to keep in the shadows with the remove background option would make this app nearly perfect!!

Developer Response ,

Hello, thank you for your feedback. We hope you can now think the app got better since its launch. We’ve unlocked even more value for our free customers including 800,000 photos from Adobe Stock, more free templates, quick actions, and a watermark-free experience for all! See all free features:https://adobe.ly/3pC8X4g. You can get help by reaching out to an agent from Adobe Support https://adobe.ly/3ra1WZv ; or by sharing on the community of experts https://community.adobe.com/; or by getting help with the support online articles https://adobe.ly/3nmtLfP. Let us know. Thanks. ^glk ⭐️🤩👍🏼😍🌻

Unsatisfactory Update, Less Design Assets

I don’t know what happened to Adobe Express. One minute it was simple, easy to use, had a wide array of design assets, and the next, I have mysticism in my face and a fraction of the variety that I used to have in design assets. (Specifically in the old categories; they have added other “modern” categories that have a wide array of options) They used to have a wonderful variety of watercolor flowers and greenery that I’ve used for countless other projects, and now they only have a handful of flowers and greenery (in the watercolor style). They’ve added another category of ‘pointillism’ flowers, but they’re not much suited for any professional designs except maybe an art teachers flyer? The new ‘textured watercolor’ flower category is not really ‘flower’ or ‘watercolor’ but more abstract, expressive, modern designs.
The few watercolor flowers they did have were dark, muddy tones, and the only watercolor flower arrangement I could find had skulls placed inside. Most of us who use adobe express use it for graphic design and professional projects, *most* of which do not feature skulls, moons, stars, symbols, hand with eyes, etc. It’s adobe’s free choice to add these elements, I just wish they had not done so at the expense of the other content. At this point it’s not usable for my professional purposes.

New update is absolutely terrible

Yesterday, April 19, 2024, I went into the app as usual and it showed me something that said if I wanted to switch to the new version or if I wanted to continue using the regular version. Being curious I wanted to see what the new version of the app was, and that was a BIG MISTAKE. The layout and everything changed and it is absolutely horrendous to work with. One big thing is that with this new layout and everything it makes my phone super slow every time I open the app now. I’ve been using your app since around late 2022 and have a no problems with it until this new update. It is so bad. It’s like how Discord changed their app’s layout with an update a few months ago and everyone hated it because of how bad it is. I’m noticing A LOT of companies doing this to their apps by changing the layout of them. If this is an considered an “upgrade” that means it’s supposed to help make the app better and easier to work with. This new update isn’t an upgrade. It has made it so much harder to work with. If there is a way I’m able to go back to using the old layout, even after it already gave me the chance and now I can’t go back, then PLEASE let me know because as of right now I am very disappointed with what this app has become now with this new update.

Developer Response ,

We're sorry to hear about your experience with our latest version. Your feedback is valuable to us. You can refer the article for more info on migration https://bit.ly/3U51XMN. Please post your queries in https://adobe.ly/3DS568s so a member of our team can take a look. Please let us know if this helps. Thank you, Neelam

Adobe does it again

Sometimes the best remain the best. This app is so perfect for creating (in my case) Instagram content that it is a must. As the world moves forward and technology evolves in ways that are hopefully making better content for everyone and keeping the highest possible standards for you and others. Adobe has created another fantastic app for IOS this time after being truly the only choice for professionals and users who are in need of professional quality without being part of their career journey or being 24 hour artist who accept the challenge of yesterday. I have been using and teaching adobe software since the beginning of photoshop 1 and illustrator 1. I knew Adobe as the only true encapsulated postscript font designer when there was a screen version and a print version for success. So I am greatly grateful and want to share my own experience with anyone reading. If you need to create the plethora of content needed in any job. Get this app. It’s a quick learning experience and it’s ADOBE EXCELLENT.

Very glitchy

I really want to love this app because Adobe products are my preferred programs for all things photography and work related. I was so excited that they came out with Adobe express so I could have one software to use with my coworkers on team projects. We used Canva and learned very quickly if someone created a template and decided to leave or remove you then you would lose all your hard work and have to start over. The biggest issue with Adobe Express is that for the life of me I can’t get the app and website to synch my template. I reached out to support and still can’t get them to communicate. The website is so glitchy and will crash while you are editing. I can’t get my documents to download as a complete pdf either. My two options are single page pdfs or images to combine into a pdf. But these are minor issues compared to the fact that the program won’t communicate between platforms. This is a huge issue for someone in the professional world considering the only option to edit on a phone is the app since the computer version is still in beta. I really wanted to give more stars but can’t with all of these issues.

Developer Response ,

We understand the importance of seamless syncing between the app and website, especially for team projects. We are actively working on resolving the communication issues between platforms and improving the website's stability. Your feedback is valuable to us, so please share it at https://bit.ly/AdobeFeature. Thank you, Neelam

Mobile is now essentially unusable

Adobe Express originally Dobe Spark has been part of my workflow for years now but now since the update it has been rendered essentially unusable when you want to edit text instead of just opening the text window it now zooms in on your project and only select exactly where you typed not allowing you to just start immediately typing. Whenever you click on any asset more than once even on accident it zooms in to fill it in the screen so if you're trying to look at your project you have to constantly zoom out in order to make any type of adjustment. Now in order to duplicate an object you need three separate menus to click through simply to duplicate or group items. before the update fonts were clustered in nice little icons so that you could easily select a font you wanted instead now it is a lengthy list that you need to doom scroll in order to find anything. how the app was previously was essentially perfect and now I think I'm just gonna have to cancel my subscription and find an alternative because even after learning how to use the update there is no way to edit things quickly unless you use a prebuilt template. Extremely disappointing.

Developer Response ,

Hi There, sorry to hear you are experiencing issues with the app. Have you tried clearing the app cache and reinstalling the app? Could you please provide more details at https://adobe.ly/3DS568s so a team member can take a look? We are working on improving the experience and value your feedback. Thanks, ^NK