Adobe's Canva competitor Adobe Express - which now includes generative AI features - has emerged from months of beta testing and is in general release for every user, consumer, education, or enterprise pro seeking to make brand assets that work.

What is Adobe Express?

Express has become a pretty complete solution for swift content creation. It includes a wealth of video and design templates, provides access to royalty-free Adobe Stock assets and fonts, and now supports PDFs. Teams can also collaborate on work, and the software is smart enough to create short animations from still images using Adobe Character Animator.

There are several noteworthy features in the latest iteration of Express. The one you'll likely be less aware of is the introduction of a unified editor, which makes it much easier to create assets for use across various outputs - PDFs and Insta posts, for example.

But what makes the release most interesting is the integration of Firefly, which makes it possible to use text prompts to tweak and improve creative works and apply image and text effects. In use, the AI also helps you swiftly remove image/video backgrounds, convert formats, and create animations.

Who uses Express?

Adobe says Express already has more than 50 million people using the app. It is currently available as an online service for Macs and PCs, with a mobile version in development. The tool is included within most Creative Cloud plans, with a free version also available.

Enterprises use Express because it builds pleasing creative assets that can also be made consistent across multiple formats.

"We can bypass repetitive, manual tasks and save time without compromising our brand or creative output," Bridget Esposito, vice president and group creative director at Prudential, said in a statement.

Companies like that its relative ease-of-use means they can spend their marketing budgets more selectively while maintaining consistency across branded work.

"Ensuring that our brand is represented correctly and coherently in the digital world is paramount, and a task that is distributed across many of our global teams," said Christina Lehnert, digital brand experience manager at Carl Zeiss AG, in a statement. "With Adobe Express, we're creating outstanding and brand uniform content in a way that's scalable."

What makes Express even more useful is that users can access, edit, and work with creative assets from Photoshop/Illustrator, and deploy linked files to ensure all assets remain in tune with company branding. "With Express and Firefly for Enterprise, any employee across an organization can generate beautiful, ready-to-share content," Adobe said.

"With ground-breaking innovations and generative AI at the core of Express, we're empowering an ever-expanding user base with an AI-first, all-in-one tool that makes content creation fast, easy and fun," said Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice president, Adobe Express and Digital Media Services at Adobe. "The all-new Express is revolutionizing how people turn ideas into stunning content and we're just getting started with exciting innovations across image creation, design, video, audio, PDFs and more still to come."

What about copyright?

One interesting note is that while Adobe has been working intensively with AI to augment its creative products, when it comes to generative AI the company was early to recognize the need to avoid copyright abuse.

Already, we've seen instances in which assets created by these tools have abused the copyright held by creatives, and given the company's position as a provider of creative solutions for creative users it was smart to think about how to avoid being in such a position.

This is why Firefly and the gen AI used in Express and its other products has been trained on unique data, rather than copyrighted assets. Given that inadvertent abuse of other people's intellectual ideas has now been recognized as a big problem, it's reassuring Adobe got to this early.

Hands on with Express

I've been using Express to create web and print assets for local community projects I'm involved with. What I like about it is the breadth and width of its library of templates and the ease with which items can be repurposed for different uses - turning a large, printed poster into a small Instagram post has never been so easy, and the system is great at maintaining consistency when you do.

The generative AI features are also really promising, generating some great results, though I would advise against using it to create faces, hands, or groups of people - the tech finds it hard to create those convincingly. But it's great for removing backgrounds, adding features, tweaking colors, and so on.

All the same, as a relatively low-budget tool with which to quickly create attractive marketing resources, Express is solid, though you will always benefit from using a human designer. Designers, of course, also benefit from being able to use Firefly within Adobe's creative tools to automate the dull work while focusing on the good ideas they hope to build.

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