Adobe Spark Page is an amazing story-telling platform. It can be used as a travel journal to share adventures, a means to display a portfolio, or as a marketing or training tool. I am just getting my feet wet, having created a couple of on-line journals to share with friends, and am very excited by future possibilities.

In a nutshell, Adobe Spark Page allows you to blend together different communication tools–photos, text, videos, links, and  “glideshows,” in one presentation on a “Page”. Once your Page is completed, you create a link to share with your target audience. I made a short Page to show you what I am talking about, and to spotlight a few of the  design options. Just click on this link.

I also put together a very short glideshow. The glideshow is like a slide show in the background of your Page. Your images take up the whole screen, and the viewer glides from photo to photo, scrolling down the Page. You are able to superimpose, on the slideshow, a pop-up to which you can add text, a button with a link, or even another photo. Check it out here. 

Adobe Spark Page is free of charge to use. You can log-in through your Adobe account, Facebook or Google. Your “Page,” once created, is stored under “My Projects” in your account and can be accessed and edited at any time. There is also an application available for your iOS devices.

Before starting a Page,  I recommend deciding which photographs you would like to include. For my examples I created a collection in Lightroom of the images I planned to use. Images can be uploaded from sources such as Lightroom, Google Photos, Dropbox, and the Creative Cloud. If you prefer, you can upload images straight from your computer files. Also determine if there are any videos you would like to add.first-page

Once you have identified the content for your Adobe Spark Page, creating a Page is pretty easy, and self-explanatory. When you first begin you will be asked to type in a title, and to add a subtitle or cover photo. At the top right you are able to pick a “Theme” for your Page, which will change the title font and in some instances the look of the Page.

To add a cover photo, click the “+” sign at the bottom of the title page. An icon for adding  a photo should appear. Click the icon, and a list appears on the right side of the Page of the possible sources for your photo. I, for example, clicked Lightroom, and was taken to my Lightroom collections. I clicked the photos I wanted to add and the “Import” button and that was it.

The hard part is now over. All you have to do next is keep clicking the “+” sign and click on the icon that represents what you want to do next from the bar of icons that appears. You can add text, a photo, a video, a button with a link, a photo grid, or a glideshow. A photo grid allows you to add more than one image into a mosaic.

You can edit whatever you have added. Click what you want to edit, and a bar with editing choices will appear. When creating a glideshow, photos will be cut off a bit at the top and bottom of the Page. it is essential to set a focal point, your focus of interest, so that the important parts of your images are not cut off. A focal point option will be available to you. Move the circle that appears to set a focal point and the photo will be re-aligned.

The best way to learn to use Adobe Page is to create a Page and experiment with the different insert and editing choices. Just keep clicking away to see each of your choices at work. If you don’t like what you see, you can always delete.editing

Once you are done, click “Preview” at the top of the Page and look at your results. Close the “Preview” and continue to edit, if you want to make changes. If everything looks good, click “Share” at the top and get a link that you can share.

There is a Photo Credits box under “Options”. I typed a copyright notice in the box. You may consider doing the same.

You are provided direct sharing options through email, Facebook, or Twitter, as well as an Embed feature. I suggest copying the link for your Page elsewhere–perhaps create a folder to hold all of your links.

If you decide to edit your Page after you have created a link, or shared your Page, it is very import to go back to the “Share” pop-up and update the link so that your changes are saved.

In addition to “Page,” Adobe Spark offers “Post” and “Video”. I have yet to explore those options, but hope to move on to them sometime soon. I still have a lot more experimenting to do with Page.

Ready to get started? Click here!