What is Adobe Express?

Adobe Creative Cloud Express is an application that can be used to create sleek looking online content in a variety of formats, such as Webpages, presentations, social media content, videos. 

What can you achieve with Adobe Express?

You can create simple advertising, training or learning packages. The packages will be used for the dissemination of material, rather than interactive resources.

Pros

  • Express is a user-friendly piece of software that produces visually pleasing outputs. 
  • Express has a number of images, videos and audio clips freely available to use. 
  • Express is a good tool for small projects such as training, showcasing, advertising, and short modules where the content is media rich. 

Cons

  • Accessibility is poor as Express doesn’t provide video subtitles or text-alternatives for non-text items such as images and buttons. There are some ways you can work around this, using descriptions in text added to the page, but this would be visible to all users.
  • The software seems heavily tailored to social media and advertising use, and the build interface is off-putting because of this. 
  • There is an overuse of animation for transitions/emphasis in the finished resources which could become annoying for your audience quite quickly. 
  • The software is reasonably limited; you can only add text, images, videos and links. This will probably be sufficient for more basic courses. 
  • If a course is going to use Express for delivering content, it will need to use Blackboard or another software to deliver interactive content. This will result in a disjointed look and feel. 
  • Express resources are stored on its server; it is not possible to download build files – only output files. As such, if the person who creates the resource leaves the University, the resource cannot be updated. Projects can be shared with other users for viewing and editing purposes, but full access for publishing is not given. 
  • Express resources are not very customisable; you must select from predefined layouts and the text formatting is limited. 

Further information

Links to licence information, training materials and exemplars created by Humanities