Lucidpress: Deep-Fried Layout Design with Templates on Top

Guest Blogger Charly has been a camp counselor, K-12 math tutor, and collegiate print and digital journalist. She’s currently enjoying writing and snowboarding in Utah.

Have you ever wished there were an easy-to-learn design tool which would let you and your students fry up print and digital documents in the cloud? What if it were completely free and ran from your browser? Lucidpress leverages a powerful yet user-friendly interface to bring image and text editing capabilities to your fingertips. Both beginning and advanced teachers and students can jump into Lucidpress and learn the tools the first time they use it. The best part is that unlike other programs, Lucidpress allows for real-time collaboration: between teachers, between groups of students, and between teachers and their students.

Lucidpress is a web-based design tool that is ideal for making posters, flyers, and digital yearbooks and newsletters. You can create professional-looking documents—both print and digital—without juggling multiple programs.

Posters

Here is an example of how to make a poster in Lucidpress:

Doesn't it look great? Here are the details on how you can access this poster template:

1. Go to your Lucidpress documents
2. Click Create > New Document > For Print > Posters.
3. Select the poster template you want to work with.
4. Double-click to open the template in the Lucidpress editor.

Flyers

Here is an flyer template created in Lucidpress:

Looks mouthwatering! Once you are in the editor with this template (follow the previous steps, then choose Flyers), here’s how to make changes:

1. Double-click text areas to customize your text.
2. Double-click images to replace with your own images from Google Drive, Google Search, Facebook, Flickr, or Dropbox.
3. Double-click shapes to change their color and shape, or to delete them.
4. In the right-hand dock, you have more fine-tuning options, such as page size, word wrap, and special effects for images. This is a great opportunity to get more advanced students collaborating with beginners!

Digital Yearbooks

For more ambitious users, here is a page from a digital yearbook:

Digital interactivity brings the interactivity of video to your yearbooks, magazines, and newsletters. This is an exciting tool for budding journalists and yearbook staff to capture moments from the school year and share it with the school.

To insert YouTube video content into a digital yearbook, follow these steps:

1. From My Documents, select Create > New Document > For Digital > Yearbooks.
2. From the left-hand Content bar, drag the video icon onto the canvas.
3. Paste the YouTube URL when prompted.
4. Your video content is ready to be shared!

Check out the Lucidpress video below to see the collaboration possibilities for your students and colleagues.

This is just a taste of the creations you can whip up in Lucidpress. You’ll discover templates for training resources, photo books, newsletters, and reports. Lucidpress works equally well for print or digital documents. WIth a high degree of customizability, students—and teachers!—will have fun choosing the best typefaces, images, and colors for school projects. They’ll learn how to work with a team and incorporate feedback from others. Plus, it’s easy to incorporate Google Drive content and share with others.

You can sign up for a free account right now. Because of our continued commitment to education, we’re happy to offer Lucidpress completely free of charge to students and teachers. If you have a Lucidchart account, you can even use the same login credentials.

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Thanks to Brad Hanks in Education Outreach for putting me in touch with Charly who provided this article about Lucidpress, and thanks to Lucidpress and Lucidchart for providing AMAZING tools FREE to educators. We appreciate you!

Install Lucidpress into Google Drive via this link.