When you sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription, there are some pretty great perks on top of the applications themselves. Here are 7 nifty non-program perks included with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
Adobe Color
Adobe Color is a web application that allows you to create “unique, accessible color themes” for your creative projects across Adobe programs.
You can create your own themes or browse from trends in Adobe Stock and Behance. When you’ve found the perfect combination, you can easily convert it to any type of color code you need, such as RGB, CMYK, and Pantone colors. You’re also able to download your themes in CSS, LESS, and XML to easily place them in UX designs.
With newer features like colorblind-safe themes, you can improve the accessibility of your website and digital images. You can also check the contrast of colors with the Contrast Checker tool. It’s an easy way to test how text or shapes will show up on a specific colored background.
Adobe Fonts
Adobe Fonts is a library of more than 2,000 fonts, licensed for use for personal and commercial projects. With your Creative Cloud subscription, you get unfettered access to all of these fonts—for free—and it’s simple to start using them.
You can find fonts in the individual applications, or on the web, activate the toggle next to the font name, and start using it! You must be signed in to your Adobe account in order for the fonts to become available across your devices. But once you activate it, you’ll be able to use the font across all of your Adobe programs.
Having such a wide selection of custom-designed and beautiful fonts is a great asset to designers who want to make a creative splash. There are single fonts, which you can search for by properties, classification, or tags and defining characteristics. For instance, if you know you want an easily consumable web font, you can look for sans serif fonts.
There are also font families, which are similar fonts built on the same basic principles but with small differences such as thin and bold. If you want to use beautiful fonts, but aren’t sure what will look nice together, there are font packs that are packaged together and are sure to “work together naturally.”
Adobe Portfolio
Adobe Portfolio is web hosting for your creative portfolio. Portfolio includes web hosting for an unlimited number of web pages, although you do have to purchase the domain name separately—your custom URL web address (usually about $10-20 per year per domain name).
Adobe Portfolio is great for creative professionals who don’t want to take the time to learn how to code, as you would in other website building applications such as WordPress, because it allows you to beautifully showcase your work without a lot of that back end coding work you would have to do elsewhere.
Portfolio also works with Lightroom, which means that if you’re a photographer, you can import projects directly from Lightroom into your portfolio. If you’re active on Behance, those projects can be directly integrated into your portfolio website as well.
Behance
Behance is a social media platform for designers. Like Instagram or TikTok, creators can share their projects with other members of the platform who can then follow you and “Appreciate” or like your creative work.
The platform offers the option to do livestreaming where people can view your video in real-time. On the Adobe Live area of Behance, you can view livestreams by subject, from major programs like Illustrator and topics such as graphic design.
Behance is great for creatives and designers to get feedback on their work, and be part of a like-minded community. It can also provide inspiration for ongoing and future projects.
Cloud Services
Cloud storage space is a great asset that comes with the Creative Cloud subscription. Although most programs offer the option to save locally or to the cloud, it’s nice to have the 100 GB of cloud storage to back up your files. Another perk is that you can create folders accessible across all of your devices which will work like Dropbox and Google Drive.
Some programs, like Adobe XD, also work with cloud documents. These documents can have extra features that only work on this specific document type, such as collaboration. If you’ve ever worked with a team in a Google Doc where multiple people can edit the document simultaneously, cloud documents will be familiar because they provide the same functionality.
Collaboration
Within Adobe products, there are many convenient ways to collaborate. The tools themselves work well together, but Adobe has also been working to add collaboration tools to their programs, especially in light of how many more people have been working remotely and on distributed teams over the past couple of years.
Creative Cloud Libraries make it easy for everyone on your team to access your creative assets in one location, which helps ensure your designs and layouts remain consistent no matter who’s designing. If you’re using Creative Cloud as a solopreneur or for your own projects, Libraries are a great way to make sure you have the latest versions of your designs no matter what device you’re working from.
Collaborating within the major apps has also never been easier. You can simultaneously design and edit within Illustrator, Photoshop, XD, and Fresco. Because this feature is cloud-based, saving is automatic and you can access older versions at any time.
Getting and receiving feedback has been streamlined through collaboration features, as well. In InDesign, Fresco, Illustrator, Photoshop, and XD, you can quickly share a link to your work in progress for someone to review, and they don’t even need to have a Creative Cloud application to interact with it.
Creative Cloud Libraries
Creative Cloud Libraries is an internet, cloud-based library that allows you to share and use assets such as colors, styles, and graphics, across Creative Cloud apps.