Simplified Review – Create and Collaborate on Visual Graphics

If you’re working with visual graphics such as YouTube Thumbnails and Instagram posts, then today’s product showcase is for you. Building visual graphics and even coming up with content for your graphics is time consuming and requires skill. Today’s product showcase is Simplified, a way of creating and collaborating on visual graphics. You can even generate AI content utilising Simplified. So without further Ado, let’s dive into Simplified and build some graphics.

Here we are inside Simplified on the dashboard, where we can choose either to set up a template, we can write some content or do a video. The video right now is very limited. So what we will do right off the start here is that we will start generating some content, so you can see how it works within Simplified. So the overview here is what we have seen previously, also in Peppertype and in Ocoya.

1. Features of Simplified
2. Simplified pricing
3. Alternatives to Simplified
4. Future of Simplified
5. Pros & Cons using Simplified
6. My experience using Simplified

Features of Simplified

This is very simple. We have a list of different elements that we can generate content within. What you will see is that this is mainly short form content, and that is because Simplified is for building visual graphics. So it doesn’t make sense to have these long form content writers. We just need maybe some titles and maybe a little bit paragraph text underneath. But here you can see some different elements we can do.

What I will do in this review is that I will make a YouTube thumbnail. So I will start by generating a YouTube video title for this video. I’m doing right here. So I have chosen English as the language and then I have chosen that the video is about Simplified review. You can see the different languages they have here.

It is a bit limited right now, but hopefully they will add more languages in the future. For now we will go with English and I will press generate here you can see the results and I would go with the first one. The second one here talking about a WordPress theme is irrelevant. And the last one here is talking about the iPhone five. I know Simplified can be used as a word to simplify elements, but the first one is just perfect.

So I will definitely go with this one. Now, what I’m missing here is a way to go from the AI content module over to generating my thumbnail in this case. Because as I will show you in a moment when we are in the thumbnail generation process, I cannot utilise the AI in there. So I have to remember this or copy paste it into my thumbnail. But for now this is a great result. I will copy paste this one into the thumbnail we will now build.

You can see they have a lot of different modules over here to generate content. But now let’s go over to templates here and then search for YouTube. Here you can see we have YouTube thumbnails and now we will get a list of different templates and as I scroll it would load more and more. I think I will go with the beginner’s guide to the gym template right here.

So we now have our template and what I would do is that I will start by pasting in the text that we already made here. Now I would really like if I could click on this text element and then use the AI module to generate text within the view. So I don’t have to either have two tabs open or go out of my thumbnail view that I’m building right now and then back into it when it is I’ve generated content. It is a small thing, but it would be a huge change for me.

Now we can do a lot of different things in here.

First off, you can see that I have just added the text and I have moved it in and here we have our template overall. What I’m really missing is navigator to the different layers because you can see we have a layer with some dots here we have a triangle and then we have an image in the back. This is fine right now, but if I have big elements that overlaps other elements, it gets more difficult and then I have to move elements out of the way in order to really get to the elements I need to get to.

So a Navigator here would be great. But out here in the menu we still have all of the templates as we saw just before.

Then we have components and within components we have sub components like shapes, elements, dining and so on. So whatever you need, you basically just click on and it will then be added to your thumbnail. Here I will choose this one and I’ll just make it a little bit smaller and I will add it down here just to create some interaction on the thumbnail here you can see that the colour is way off. It needs to be either white or a little purple ish. So we will go up here and you can see the colour right now is blue and I will change it to a little bit more purple maybe around here.

And that’s great. See all of these different elements when you click on it, you get a little menu up here where you can choose to either duplicate it, you can delete it, you can add a new shape. We can also animate the specific shape. Over here in the animation. Of course, this doesn’t work on a YouTube thumbnail, but if it was a blog post that I could add on my own website, I could definitely animate the different elements here. You can see it is as easy as just choosing the animation you want and that’s it.

When you download the image, it will then do the animation you have set up. Right here it’s choosing fade that I chose. And up here we can basically preview it to see how it looks and the screen duration right now is 6 seconds. Other than components, we have text elements we can add and within text elements we have some variations. We can add 3D Glow, Shop today as you can see here and then a little bit more of a italic text right here.

I would like to see the option to add a background on my text as we see is right now really popping up in the different thumbnails because it’s a way to really highlight your text on your thumbnail, but that will be easy for them to add later on. We also have media. If you want to add your own media or you want to utilise the library of images, videos and gifs within Simplified. Here it is pulling from Unsplash so we can easily search for software and then we will get some images.

I think I will go with this image right here and see now I need to delete the old image and then I need to make sure that this image goes all the way to the back.

It would have again been a lot easier if I had a Navigator, but for now it’s fine. I’ll just add the image, make it big enough so it fills out the space and now we have our thumbnail. What is simplified, a detailed review and walkthrough that works very well. What we can also do is that we can comment on this thumbnail and this is where the collaboration perspective comes in. So here let’s say that I have made this thumbnail and I now want feedback from my colleagues or from the client.

I can then share the thumbnail with whomever I want to and then that person can easily get in here and then start commenting. It can be that as I’ve said here, I don’t like the colours. Try blue colours instead and I will then comment it. Then I can show result and unresolved answers and comments. Now it would be really cool if I could actually click on the element that I want to comment on right here, and that is possible within Simplified.

So right now I can add a comment on this specific shape. It can be that I don’t like the shape or I would like a different shape. That’s another layer to the collaboration art, and that’s really great to see. If you’re using Photoshop or similar products you are most likely using shortcuts and that is also possible within Simplified. Up here we have a control K shortcut to get this menu and here we can fast and easily add whatever we want to add to our art board.

This means that we don’t have to go to the menu over here and look for it and search for it in order to find it. We just go up here and we click and then we write whatever we would like. It could be an image. Then we click on images and then it’s shown over here and has searched for it and I would like that image and that’s how fast it is with this shortcut up here. You can also always preview your thumbnail, which we are building right now to see how it looks and this looks great.

I can play it because I have an animation and I have two artboards as we just saw. So this is the second Artboard and we can easily change between them and this is a great view to just fast see how your progress is going. Last but not least you can also export either as a PNG, JPEG or as a video. We need to choose video right now because we have chosen the animation module. Other than that, if I chose JPEG, I can choose the quality and the size.

What I’m missing here is a way to Resize all of my thumbnails easily because when I make a thumbnail, I also use the thumbnail as an image on my website, but it needs to be a different size. The size is not so different from the thumbnail, but it does make a difference. And if I can’t do that in here, then it’s losing a little bit of its value. So that’s a small thing I would really like them to add within Simplified. Now, the last element I want to show you is brand kit, because in here you can build out your brand kit and even multiple brand kits.

So if you’re working with clients, I would really recommend you making a brand kit for each of your clients because then you can fast navigate to your fonts and your colours that you use for that client so you don’t have to manually look for them every time you build a piece of graphic. However, one thing here is that I would really like to be able to choose fonts within Simplified, so I don’t have to upload my fonts. So let’s say that I’m using Google fonts. I would really like to be able to just choose the fonts so I don’t have to upload them the same we see here with the colour palette.

This is so easy to just fast add the colours we would like here with like a Brown instead the blue is fine instead of yellow I will take back the blue greenish here. This is really great and this will save a lot of time so you don’t have to all the time look for the colours, the font and the logos. You can just use it from the brand kit.

Simplified pricing

When we do look at the pricing structure, the first thing you will notice is that you can get started completely free trying out Simplified and you should definitely do that because in this way you will find out whether Simplified is for you or not. They do also have two paid plans which differs on the amount of words that you can generate and the feature set you get within. One thing I’m really sad to see is that they have put a limit on the amount of AI background removals we can use.

Personally, I use Crello a lot and within Crello I can remove the background on as many images as I want to. So I do hope that they will lift this image background removal limit that they have put on.

When we do compare the pricing to the alternatives Canva and Crello, it is quite expensive even though it’s a new product. But the reason is the AI module. Every time we use the AI module Simplified, it has to pay a fee in order for us to use it, and that is why we see the higher pricing.

Alternatives to Simplified

But now the alternatives Crello and Canva are way in front compared to Simplified. The reason being that they just have had more time to develop their tools.

They have a lot more functionality that we can work with the text modules, the images and even the shapes, whereas Simplified, they don’t have as many templates. They have limited functionality overall in the different modules that we can use when it is that we sit and build our graphics. So of course by time Simplified, will build all of these modules on and get up next to Crello and Canva. But for now they are a bit behind.

Future of Simplified

When we do look into the future of Simplified, it can be a little bit confusing. The reason being that they’re working on two long form content generators, and when we build visual graphics, it just doesn’t make sense to build a lot of content because you will never put that on visual graphics, though some exciting elements they’re working on is a shape generator, so we can basically draw out our shapes that we would like to use on our visual graphics. Furthermore, they’re working on integrations to social media, Dropbox and even Shopify, so we can easily push our visual graphics from Simplified over to whatever platform we are using.

Last, but not least they’re working on overall improvements of the app, so we will see better flows, better way of using the different modules and even performance boosts.

Pros & Cons using Simplified

Moving on to the pros and cons of Simplified. Starting with the pros, they have an AI content generation module.

The app works very well in the browser. The brand kit saves you time and they have integrations that can automate your workflow, whereas for the cons, they do not have that many prebuilt templates. The AI content generator is not as well integrated. I’m missing a layer Navigator and I’m missing Resize options so I can build graphics in multiple sizes.

My experience using Simplified

Using Simplified, you never run out of social media posts, YouTube thumbnails, or any type of graphics. They are constantly adding more and more templates in order to make your life easier.

Overall, I will give Simplified three and a half stars, but yea, that is my review of Simplified. I hope that you liked the video and if you did please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to Simplified or other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below.

Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.