Adobe unveils Spark tool suite for small/medium businesses

Some projects created in Adobe Spark.

Small and medium-sized businesses have more free ways to present their stories to customers, with Adobe’s recent announcement of its Spark suite of tools.

They are intended for the creation of visually based marketing material for the Web and social networks, provided as four applications. Three of them are rebranded, existing iOS apps, and one is new.

In addition to web pages and social posts, the tools enable the creation of company event announcements, newsletters, lessons, flyers, brochures, small catalogs and explainer videos.

The renamed iOS apps are Spark Post (formerly Adobe Post, released last year), a tool for creating and posting text and graphics to social networks. Spark Page (Adobe Slate from last year) is for generating web pages. Spark Video, called Adobe Voice at its birth in 2014, enables the creation of moving icons, photos, text and graphics, which Adobe calls “animated videos.”

For this release, Page adds iPhone to its previous support of iPad, while Post adds iPad to its previous iPhone. Adobe Director of Product Management Brian Nemhauser told me that Android versions are being planned.

The new app is the browser-based Adobe Spark itself, which covers the creation and posts of all of the above: social posts, web stories and animated videos.

Businesses can add a button that leads to more content, although there’s no ability to, say, readily add an email signup or a “buy now” ecommerce capability. The tools are free, but Nemhauser said the company will eventually add premium, paid levels.