Ben Forta | Blog

Blog posts tagged Spark

It's here! The public beta of Adobe Spark Post on Android is now available. Details in this blog post.

We just updated Adobe Spark to support custom fonts, now when creating and managing your brand and branded themes, you can upload your own fonts to the brand. Custom font support is a Premium Feature, so it's available as part of any paid plan (Creative Cloud or Spark). It is also available for free to education users as part of Spark for Education.

Adobe Spark Post's Magic Layout sets you up for success quickly by employing a content-aware layout system to suggest intelligent cropping and layout positions based on the content you choose for your design. It makes educated guesses for you to get you almost all the way to a finished product. For instance, if you choose one tall photo and one wide photo and add a text element, Spark Post will automatically place your content in a layout with one vertical and one wide cell. Even more amazingly, it will position an editable text box where the system detects there's relative empty space and common design rules predict it will be most readable. The magic behind Magic Layout is artificial intelligence, as this post explains.

Roanoke County Public Schools (RCPS) in Virginia gave Spark for Education a try this past school year, and the results were beyond what I could have imagined. Their journey started with teachers from the district coming across Spark and trying it themselves. Within minutes of using Spark, teachers at RCPS were thinking of what this could do for their students and were asking how quickly they could have it in their classroom. And in a matter of weeks they deployed Spark to all of the 15,000+ students and teachers (and in the middle of the school year!). You can read more in Sharif Karmaly's blog post.

Today we announced the availability of Adobe Spark for Education, the same Adobe Spark that you know and love (and like Adobe Spark, just as free), but adapted to better suit the needs of our younger users.

This idea is perfect for younger students, and works particularly well when using Adobe Spark on the iPad. The idea is to encourage students to create their own storybook with not just their own story, but also their own pictures and their own voice telling the tale.

Lots of teachers encourage students to keep a daily journal, something short, focused, a few minutes of personal expression and communication to start each day. Student journals are usually written, but they need not be, and video journals are cool and lots of fun for kids to create. Here's how it works:

One of the most popular features in Adobe Spark is the ability to search the internet for free Creative Commons images for use in videos, pages, and post. Spark is used extensively by children, and so we utilize safe-search to ensure that only appropriate images are returned. But, no public image search is ever 100% safe, that's an unfortunate reality.

Last week at BETT in London we announced that Adobe Spark, including Premium Features, would be made available for free to students and teachers. The release is planned for April, so not a lot of details were provided with the announcement. But, there's been huge interest in the upcoming offering, and lots of you have been wanting more information. So, with time to spare on this flight from London back Stateside, I've compiled some notes that should hopefully better explain things. (Of course, details could change between now and the planned release in April).

Students (and their teachers) love Adobe Spark. But, Spark isn't quite perfect, yet. The two most common concerns are expressed by teachers are the lack of support for minor (under 13) logins, and the lack of integration with existing school logins.

Well, both are about to be resolved.