Adobe is sparking change! The San Jose-based tech company best known for its Photoshop, Illustrator and Premier editing software used by creative professionals, is now democratising design through a free to use app.

At Adobe Max, the mega summit for creative professionals attended by over 12,000 people at Las Vegas last week, the biggest talking point was Sensei, the artificial intelligence powering all of Adobe’s software and apps. But commanding equal interest was Adobe Spark — the free, mobile friendly graphic design app that any hobbyist can use to tell stunning visual stories.

It is a simplified version of Adobe’s powerful paid editing and creation software. What’s more it’s also got social plug ins built into it so that you can seamlessly share your creation on Instagram as well as Behance, the social network for creative people owned by Adobe. Behance has 10 million users.

The rationale behind Adobe launching Spark is quite easy to understand. Pretty much every professional designer and photographer uses Adobe’s paid products that today are lumped into a Creative Cloud or can be bought through a Photography Plan. But growth for Adobe can come only if it draws in non-professionals into its creative world. Enter Spark, launched last year, which Shantanu Narayen, chairman, president and CEO at Adobe Systems, said has been generating a huge amount of interest.

“We want to make creativity more accessible to individuals,” Narayen said during the opening keynote at Max. “Whether office workers or individuals everyone should be able to find a better way to communicate.” He also pointed out that till now creativity was tethered to screens. But Adobe wanted to spark new creations with a touch, a swipe and other methods. “We are now trying to reimagine the entire creative process to put our assets on your fingertips and through new user interfaces,” he said.

Later during the conference, Paul Burnett, principal evangelist Adobe Creative Cloud, APAC, demonstrated how Spark worked. We watched as he chose a Story template on Spark. A series of cards or boxes pop up onto which he uploaded a few pictures of tigers from his trip to Ranthambore (you can even insert videos), cropping a bit and editing a few things. The application prompts you to key in a text caption, give headlines and an intro. It took Burnett just five to 10 minutes to put together a web page with a lovely look about it. You can view it as a slide show or as a page scrolling down. Once you are happy with your creation, you can post it on to any social platform. The only disadvantage with Spark is that it carries Adobe’s branding prominently everywhere.

However, at Max, Adobe also showcased a paid version of Spark called Spark Premium. In this, you can remove the Adobe branding as well as change fonts and colours to put your brand’s fonts. The target group for the paid app is small and medium enterprises.

What’s compelling about Spark is the automation that’s packed into it. You can change themes, layouts, filters and the application will adapt the design.

“Spark is aimed at anyone with a story to tell, amateur photographers, bloggers and vloggers,” says Burnett.

But a surprising use case, he shares is for hiring. Adobe’s own HR department uses Spark for recruiting and onboarding. Candidates put their resumes as visual stories on Spark. “When one of our products goes viral internally, we know we are onto a good thing” grins Burnett.

The writer was in Las Vegas, US, at the invitation of Adobe

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