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January 2018 Update of Adobe XD
2018 is off to a good start. We’re happy to announce that we are delivering many of the features that you have been requesting — including the ability to use XD with other prototyping and hand-off tools, to switch between color models, to apply radial gradients, and to export objects in a batch.
Check out Adobe Live from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PDT on January 23rd to 25th, 2018 to see top UX designers using these latest features in Adobe XD.
The ability to bring your XD designs into popular prototyping and hand-off tools is one of the top requested features. We heard you, and we are excited to announce that XD now works with Zeplin, Avocode, Sympli, ProtoPie, and Kite Compositor. Start your designs in XD, then bring them into your favorite tool to speed up developer hand-offs and create advanced animations. Learn more about the integrations here. Please note that these integrations are available on Mac only at this time. If you’re a Windows user, we’d love to hear what tools you’d like us to integrate with!
While we continue adding new partner apps that work with XD, we are not slowing down our effort in enhancing our prototyping and hand-off capabilities. Please view the status of most requested prototyping features here and hand off features here, and vote for what you need.
One of the key XD principles is prioritizing quality over shortcuts. As such, we are continuously working hard to keep XD as lightweight and as fast as possible — because no matter how many new features we add, we know it doesn’t matter in the end if you can’t design at the speed of thought. In this release, we are delighted to announce that we’ve dramatically improved the zoom performance so that you can now zoom in and out of canvas with thousands of artboards instantaneously, without any lag. See the video below.
We’re excited to announce that you can now preview XD files that are saved to Dropbox. Without downloading an XD file, you can see the first artboard in the preview. Learn more about how this works here.
In this release, you can switch between three common color models (HEX, RGB, and HSB) from the dropdown menu in the color picker. Before this release, you could only work in the HEX code or HSB value in the color picker. With this addition, you can effectively communicate your colors to your developers and design teams. This means you can use XD seamlessly with other Creative Cloud design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, which support HEX, RGB and HSB.
When it comes to design, color has the potential to make or break a product. We’ve noticed that multi-tone effects are driving modern design in a big way. In this release, we’re introducing radial gradients so that you can easily create unique color effects by simulating a light source or applying circular patterns. You can add, remove, and manipulate color stops with similar intuitive interface as linear gradients.
We’re happy to introduce a few enhancements to Design Specs (Beta) that let you navigate and use it more efficiently. First, we made it easier to read the measurements by adjusting their placement when inspecting designs. We also added essential keyboard accessibility so that you can use certain keys, such as tab when navigating and +/- when zooming in the browser.
As always, we are continuing to improve and add functionality to Design Specs (Beta), so look out for more future updates.
When you share your prototypes, designs are now viewed at actual size in full-screen mode, rather than being scaled to fit the screen. This is particularly useful for web design where you cannot predict a reviewer’s viewport size. At actual size, the prototype will scroll automatically when parts of the design are out of view.
While the scaling of artboards has changed in full-screen mode, artboards in the standard view continue to scale to fit. In the future, we plan to make scaling options available to you at publish time.
You can now export objects in batches. Previously, you had to manually select the objects each time before an export. Batch export simplifies and streamlines the process of identifying and then exporting select assets. This is especially useful when you need to export them to third-party tools or share with developers. Simply mark objects by clicking a mark icon on the layer panel then selecting “Batch” option under File > Export.
To get the latest update of Adobe XD, you can download the January release here or from your Creative Cloud desktop app.
If you don’t see the latest release of XD available in your Creative Cloud desktop app, check out this helpful guide.
Enjoy these enhancements and keep creating and sharing incredible experiences with Adobe XD!
UX Community: Let’s keep the conversation going! You can follow our handle @AdobeXD for updates or reach the team on Twitter using the #AdobeXD. You can also chat with us on Facebook, where we share videos and updates as well as answer questions during live sessions.
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#MadeWithAdobeXD: While sharing your prototypes on Behance, don’t forget to tag them with #MadeWithAdobeXD and select Adobe XD under “Tools Used” for the opportunity to be featured in the Adobe XD Newsletter.
AI-driven updates, curated by humans and hand-edited for the Prototypr community
