After returning from the TCO18 Indonesia Regional event held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia at the end of 2018, I learned that use of Adobe XD would be allowed as a source file for the UI Design Challenges in Topcoder. When I opened the Adobe XD website, which explained a number of limited features, I felt this application would not be better than Sketch. But it never hurts to try, so I installed Adobe XD. This application is available on the Windows platform, which I still used often at the time.
All my judgments changed when I saw Adobe XD’s very simple and organized interface. I feel that Adobe XD can help users focus on the design instead of being busy looking at various tools or menus that are visible on other interfaces such as Sketch. Because this is an application made by Adobe, I’m sure in the future there will be many feature updates according to the advice of designers around the world.
Do you feel it is impossible to fall in love with Adobe XD because of the simple interface? Maybe you should read about the best features of Adobe XD, which I explain below.
Adobe XD allows you to work together with several other designers in one file in real time. This will speed up your project workflow and eliminate the risk of duplicate or conflicting work between designers. You can see everything that other designers are working on in the same design file. The file will be automatically saved in Creative Cloud on a regular basis and document history is available so you know by who and when the file was saved.
You can import Sketch, Psd, and Ai files into Adobe XD with perfect results - no design changes from the original file. I often work on various projects that were originally formatted in Psd and I save them in XD format because the experience of designing on XD is more fun than Photoshop or Illustrator.
This feature allows you to browse versions of design files that were previously created. You don’t need to worry about when the file will be saved to the document history because your file is saved periodically in the Creative Cloud. Document history is available for up to thirty days, and you can bookmark a particular version to prevent that version of the file from disappearing past thirty days.
At the end of 2019, Adobe XD supports prototyping with multiple interactions. The presence of this feature makes Adobe XD able to pursue prototype features found in Marvelapp or Invisionapp. You no longer need to make a duplicate artboard just to show a number of different interactions that you want to be displayed on one design page. And, don’t forget voice prototyping, which is one of the best prototype features on Adobe XD.
At the time of this article’s creation there are more than 200 different plugins available for Adobe XD. Of course this will have an impact on the plugin search experience you want. The plugin manager update of November 4, 2019 will help you find the plugins you need, browse various plugin categories, see more information about a plugin and see the reviews of other designers who have tried the plugin.
The blend modes in Adobe XD are very similar to those in Photoshop and Illustrator. This feature will help you enhance images or graphics with mixed image color modes. Various blend modes are available such as darken, multiply, color burn, lighten, screen, color dodge, overlay, soft light, difference and hue, saturation, color and luminosity. These will be familiar to those of you who often edit photos in Photoshop.
Having trouble editing images in your Adobe XD file? That will not happen again since the presence of the “Edit in Photoshop” feature. Just right-click on the image you want to edit and then select Edit in Photoshop. The image will automatically open in Photoshop. Edit the image as needed, save, and then the image in Adobe XD automatically follows the editing that you did in Photoshop.
If you want to present a website design or mobile application in the form of animation, then you can directly export the XD design to After Effect. This is much easier than exporting design assets in PNG, JPG, SVG format and then importing the file into After Effect.
This feature allows you to duplicate a group of design elements as many times as you want and adjust the distance between the elements. You can create realistic-looking random data with the help of the “Repeater” plugin which has a variety of data options and an image download feature from unsplash.
When you open a XD document, the Adobe Font will be activated automatically and the missing or not installed font will appear in the Adobe XD assets panel. You can highlight the missing font to see which font is on which artboard.
Of course there are many more qualified features of Adobe XD that you can see on the following page: https://www.adobe.com/sea/products/xd/features.html
So did this article make you fall in love with Adobe XD? Or do you still need to see various other features?
Do not hesitate to visit the official page of Adobe XD to view articles and videos that explain how these superior features work.