In June of 2023 I first saw the “New” Adobe Express and was extremely impressed. It was Adobe’s long-awaited answer to Canva, and it had some draw-dropping features. The AI, especially, was quite wonderful. But the key thing I wanted to see was extensibility. While it wasn’t robust back then, it had some immediate power for what we wanted to do, and the momentum was exciting. Over the past year, both the core product and its extensibility features have advanced rapidly and beautifully.
But much like Canva, Express didn’t start with a print focus. The core PDF output was far better than Canva, but it didn’t really offer print-ready documents: there were no bleeds, print profiles, pre-flighting, or many of the other elements required for printing at scale. Rather, it gave you a great PDF graphic that could be placed in InDesign or Illustrator to print. That was it. At Silicon Publishing, we set out to fix this, and we released our free Print Reddy add-on, offering adjustable bleeds and basic pre-flighting, with more features to come.
Today, Print Reddy is still in its infancy, but it’s already available to all Express users, and is becoming more robust. We are excited about the main feature for the next release: PDF with rendition intent. If you’re printing from home, current Express output will likely be pretty good, with or without Print Reddy. But when you are sending a job to a printer, there is a really good chance they will want you to use a standard PDF profile such as PDF/X-4, or even custom profiles for their specific devices.
Print Reddy and Print Reddy Pro will soon make both possible – Print Reddy itself will default to PDF/X-4, while Pro will offer all standard profiles, as well the ability to upload your own. These can deliver first-class print output in compliance with modern print production standards.
For printers, the really exciting news is that Print Reddy can be white labeled. If you are a printer wishing to tap into the growing Express user base and take advantage of the wonderful templates already in the product (or offer users your own template library), you can white label Print Reddy. This means any Express user could send their print orders directly to your locations for fulfillment. You can also make Express your own white-label editor for print documents (or other document output types) using the power of the ever-improving Embed SDK. We find ourselves helping organizations extend Express like this more and more.
We are thrilled to see Adobe doing Express the right way, offering very serious extensibility features. And as it finds its way into more and more solutions over time, we’re glad that print remains an output format that still enjoys considerable respect. Contact us if you need help navigating the Express waters, or wish to integrate this powerful into your systems.