‘Our app enables everyone to create… it scales with you’: Adobe Express Head of Product Ian Wang

Ian Wang, Head of Product for Adobe Express (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

Adobe Express shares similarities with design platforms like Canva and Microsoft Designer, allowing users to quickly and easily create flyers, posters, social media posts, PDFs, and more. The company launched Express in late 2021 with the promise of delivering the best of Adobe for everyone, as many of its cloud applications’ best features rolled into a single editing experience. The app comes in both a free version and a paid edition with additional capabilities and a library of more complex templates.

Adobe has a suite of apps and services for creative professionals, but Express is different in that it provides non-professionals with editing tools that allow them to bring their vision to life. “Every app has a very different bullseye,” Wang said. “If you use Premiere Pro, you are thinking about colour grading or fine-tuning controls, and that is always going to be the case. So generative AI in that context is different from generative AI in the context of Express.”

Express is getting features such as Generative Fill, which enables users to add, remove, or replace items, people, and other aspects of images using text prompts (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

Earlier this year, Adobe made designing and editing content on Express much easier by using generative artificial intelligence, thanks to the integration of the Firefly AI image generator into the app.

At this year’s Adobe MAX conference, Express is getting features such as Generative Fill, which enables users to add, remove, or replace items, people, and other aspects of images using text prompts. It is also getting the Text-to-Template function, which helps users generate editable templates for things like graphics and social media posts based on text descriptions. Express also supports a new Translate tool, which localizes content in 45 languages. There are also new Drawing and Painting capabilities with 50 multicolour paint and decorative brushes intended to mimic charcoal, pencil, and watercolour textures.

When asked whether Generative AI is oversimplifying creativity using prompts, Wang responded, “A creative professional’s job is to do something unique, and if they leverage AI in the same way as the same prompt, everything is going to look the same. We don’t see it replacing career professionals; we really see it as another tool in our arsenal,” he added.

Adobe Express is available in beta and is free for all users on desktops. The mobile version is coming soon, confirms Wang.

The writer is in Los Angeles on the invite of Adobe.