Adobe has announced significant updates to Adobe XD CC that will help to streamline the designer-to-developer hand off process, enhance collaboration, and speed up the design process. The updates strengthen Adobe’s position as the end-to-end solution for UX design, giving users the ability to design, prototype, share and hand off to developers without having to use multiple apps or services. While designing and sharing prototypes are major components of the user experience workflow, the hand off between designers and developers often represents a considerable ‘pain point’ in the production workflow, said the company. XD now includes Design Specs (Beta), which lets designers share automatically generated design specs from their interactive prototypes – instead of manually marking-up their designs for developers. By simply opening a link, developers can inspect flows between screens, measurements, colours and styles of the design. This makes it much easier for them to write code that matches the design, quickly converting prototypes into production experiences. Other key improvements that address customer feedback include:
Layout Grid. Customizable column grids enable a consistent, organized look across designs with the ability to manage proportions between elements. Layout Grid makes it faster and easier to design for multiple screen sizes, and eliminates the need to use the square grid or manually create a grid.
JPG Export. Assets and art boards can be exported in the popular JPG format without needing to convert them in another app.
Text enhancements. Point text to area text (or vice versa) can be switched with a click of a button, and the last-used text properties such as font family, size and weight, are remembered when creating a new text object.
Improvements for Windows 10. Pan and zoom with two fingers is now supported on touch-enabled Windows 10 devices – and design elements from Adobe InDesign CC can be copied and pasted into XD.
Adobe releases updated solutions to streamline the design process
