The vendor states Adobe Spark allows users to create beautiful graphics, web pages, and video stories in minutes, offering free themes, fonts, and images, as well as editing. Imagery assembled or created can be presented through Spark Post, Spark Page, and Spark Video. Adobe Spark is available through a Creative Cloud subscription, free with the Starter Plan, or on a single product license via the Team or Individual plan.
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Figma
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
I would recommend Adobe CC Express, especially if the colleague were an established Adobe user. The interface is designed so that anyone familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or any other Adobe software products, will be familiar. This is a product that competes with Canva, but it's great to have the simplicity of Canva with an interface that feels familiar from day one.
A solo developer or small team that wants to integrate development, feature planning and ui design in a single app can find a lot of value in using Figma, since the FigJam whiteboard and UI editor are in the same app. Business plans and software features can be mapped out on FigJam and then implemented in the UI editor, that way there is reduced context switching and teams can operate smoothly without having to toggle between multiple apps.
As a visual designer, I spend 90% of my working time in Figma. So, as a design tool, Figma is mature and feature-rich. It covers all the basic needs and provides extras, such as simple prototyping and the ability to use external plugins.
Collaboration: It’s very easy to work together on the same file in Figma. You can easily brainstorm together or use Figma as a shared screen.
Smartness of components: Figma provides many adaptability options for components that allow building very flexible and scalable layouts.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express's video possibilities could be improved - I'd really like to see more options for animating text. Animoto is a great example of this. But the video is already improving, so perhaps these options are coming!
Sometimes images don't download properly from the web app and I have to download using the phone app and then transfer to my desktop for scheduling.
It would be cool if there was an approve / feedback option, so you could request feedback from a team member without having to share a link and send a separate email.
Access control - it wasn't apparent to me at first that a project was shared with everyone in the company vs just people i choose to share it with. I think the inverse should be the default.
Sometimes it struggles to import old sketch files - no clue how to make this better, but its frustrating
The overall usability of the software was strong. The application, especially relative to other Adobe services like Photoshop that can demand a lot of knowledge and skill, was highly easy to use. At the same time, that also speaks to the somewhat limited amount of customization opportunities that allow content designers to truly create content that is dynamic, engaging, and different than the standard stuff that floods our vision every day.
It's so simple to use! I have no background in UI design but basic designing and I was able to learn this software Figma within 3-5 days. There are tons of tutorials available on Youtube from so many popular YouTubers in the space, you can just go through them and start designing.
Because adobe is so widespread the community support is amazing. I have never actually used adobe support short of their website, but I go to youtube a lot to get my questions answered. You can google any problem you have and not have any issues finding an answer. In my opinion, community support is much more meaningful and helpful than support directly from the company
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
I used Canva for a long time, but since we already had the Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Creative Cloud Express was included, I went ahead and started using Adobe Creative Cloud Express, as it was more cost-effective. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Cloud Express doesn't offer any content calendar and scheduling, so it was a difficult choice.
Much more intuitive, Adobe XD fails to keep up with the newest market changes thus it did not let us stay on top of the technology. The big plus of Figma is that the majority of our clients worked with it, whereas it was not the case with Adobe XD. You can get similar results working with both, but the process will be different in Figmas favour
Adobe Creative Cloud Express is included with an Adobe Creative Cloud account. Our company has a corporate team membership so it is nice to have a professional and powerful tool that anyone on our team can use for free. The pricing structure of giving the tool away for free will be fundamental to users utilizing the tool. Similar tools, such as Canva, cost significantly more but do not offer the same features
The professional services for Adobe Creative Cloud Express is top notch and should be highly commended. I am thoroughly impressed with how far Adobe has come. In the past, I had several issues with how something were handled, but in the past few years things have been better than ever and they get no complaints from me
