Create, Add, and Share Your Brand Assets with Creative Cloud Libraries

Image source: Creative Cloud Libraries.

Creative Cloud Libraries provides a built-in brand system that allows designers to share brand assets across creative teams. Libraries can be accessed from a wide range of locations, including Adobe mobile apps, service sites like Adobe Stock, Adobe Color, as well as a whole range of desktop applications including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and more.

Creating a Creative Cloud Library

Libraries can be created in many of the Creative Cloud desktop and mobile apps, as well as on the Creative Cloud for enterprise website. Once created, libraries can be accessed from a wide range of locations. The example below illustrates how to create a library from both a mobile app and a desktop app.

After creating and naming your library, you can populate your library with a variety of asset types, including colors, artwork, photos, text styles, brushes, and even direct links to preview artwork from Adobe Stock. As you work in different apps, add assets to your library that will help you and your team design a more cohesive presence for your brand.

Adding library assets from Creative Cloud desktop apps

The library panel in the desktop app features a small plus sign in the lower left corner. When you have an asset selected, such as an imported logo in an InDesign document (shown above), this will activate the plus button in the library panel. Clicking the plus button will add the selected logo into your library as a graphic asset. This will also modify your document to reference the logo directly from your library, instead of the local copy of the file that you had originally imported. This will allow you to automatically update the logo if it is ever modified, ensuring that you are always working with the latest assets.

Adding library assets from Creative Cloud mobile apps

Mobile apps can also make use of your libraries. Creative Cloud mobile apps give you some very unique ways to capture and create unique assets for your design projects, including creating brushes, generating unique patterns, and even generating custom color swatches from photos.

In the figure above, a photo is being used in the Adobe Capture mobile app, to create some colors for the new Iceland tours being offered by our client. Once the colors are captured and modified, they can be saved directly to our team’s library. And just as with the logo example we discussed earlier, any modifications to the colors can be automatically applied to any design project across the Creative Cloud.

Adding library assets from the cloud

In addition to desktop and mobile apps, your libraries are also accessible from web services in the Creative Cloud. After you have created some amazing color combinations on Adobe Color, or found the perfect asset on Adobe Stock, you can add those items directly to your library.

Once you have searched the Adobe Stock website for the perfect asset, click on the item to bring up the asset details. In the example above, I have found a video that will be a great addition to the photography we shot for our client. From the detail view I can choose to save the video directly to my brand library — making the video available to the entire design team.

Once you have created a library, you can share them with your design teams using the collaboration feature. You can also grant two different permission levels for your collaborators — they can either only view the library, or they can actively edit the contents along with you.

Collaborators can be added to your libraries in a number of ways throughout the Creative Cloud. The figure above shows the process when using a library panel in one of the Creative Cloud desktop apps. Clicking the panel menu from the panel reveals a range of options, including an option named Collaborate. You will then be taken to the Creative Cloud website where you can invite people to join your library.

Learn more about Creative Cloud Libraries

Join Chris Converse in the Achieve Brand Consistency Across Your Teams webinar and explore how to create, update, and share assets with all members of your creative organization. Learn to link creative assets directly to Creative Cloud Libraries in order to maintain consistency across all your campaign efforts.

In this recorded session you’ll learn how to:

Create your own libraries.

Add items to your libraries from Adobe websites.
Add artwork and text styles from desktop apps.
Work with libraries in your mobile apps.
Share libraries with clients and colleagues.
Define paragraph and character styles.
Add colors, patterns, and brushes from Adobe Capture.

Adobe Creative Cloud e-learning series