June Update of Adobe Experience Design CC (Preview)
Now available in French, German, and Japanese
On behalf of the entire Adobe XD team, I’m excited to announce the latest monthly update for June 2016. Take a moment to download Adobe XD now or update via Help>Check for Updates… in the product.
We’re striving to build a product that designers love. We’re paying close attention to User Voice and appreciate your comments, votes and suggestions so as to help us better research, prioritize and design new features. Thanks for all feedback and please do keep it coming.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
What’s New in this Update?
Measurements
We’ve been hearing from the community that handing off assets to developers is a critical part of your workflow. We began with generating production-ready assets for your mobile and web workflows, and now we’re providing the first in a series of features aimed at giving developers the information they need to implement the designs pixel-perfect (or, dare I say, “point-perfect”).
Measurements work like a physical ruler on a desk. Select any objects on the canvas, and it will provide you horizontal and vertical distances between them, no matter where the objects are in the hierarchy.
https://blog.adobe.com/media_b2fb755bcc0bf8cc9699d06c3353f5155c0de2a0.gif
Activating measurements
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Hit Alt/Option with any object selected. XD will display a distance from the object’s edges in relation to the artboard. This is very useful if you are setting up constraints or positioning the object relatively based on a different edge, like bottom/right.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements1.png -
Select an object, hold Alt/Option and roll over another one. XD will display measurements in relation to the second object.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements2.png -
XD supports measurements relative to a container if the object is contained visually within another.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements3.png -
When objects don’t intersect on the same axis, we show helper guides and distances relative to them.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements4.png -
When object is rotated, we calculate the distance from the rectangular bounding box and display it around the object.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements5.png -
You can also see the measurements while nudging. Just hold Alt/Option and nudge at the same time. Position the mouse on the objects towards you want to see the measurement.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements-nudge.gif
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/measurements-nudge2.gif
Background and Object Blur
With this release of XD, you can now apply blur effects to any shape or text.
XD supports two kinds of blurs:
- Object blur, which blurs the object itself
- Background blur, which blurs everything below the object
Object blur applies a blur directly to the selected object. You can control the blur amount with the slider.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/blur.png
Background blur helps you highlight a specific part of the UI while keeping the focus in the same visual context. This effect is commonly used on iOS, macOS and Windows.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/backgroundblur.png
Background blur offers three different settings:
- Blur amount
- Brightness (from dark to light)
- Opacity (additive to the element’s fill opacity)
https://blog.adobe.com/media_20c00d4967159b2c7c939bc194c90cf5fed1d106.gif
Embedding prototypes into a website
In addition to sharing links, you can now embed your prototypes within a website. This also allows you add your prototype to Behance so that anyone can experience them in the context of your project.
As soon as you switch from Link -> Embed, XD will provide you an iframe HTML snippet.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/embed.png
Expanded Language Support
In addition to English, XD is now available in Japanese, German and French, with more languages to come in the future.
What’s Coming Soon?
Go To Previous Artboard
This feature will be especially useful for back buttons, so you can have fewer wires with much more dynamic behavior.
Zoom Tool
We listened to your feedback, and we are adding the zoom tool together with temporary zoom via space+cmd. Coming to a toolbar near you soon.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/06/zoomtool.png
PDF Import/Export
PDF is commonly used in clipboard, and this update will improve copy and paste from other tools like Sketch, Keynote, etc. You will also be able to export selected artboards and assets into PDF.
But wait! There’s more exciting stuff that we’re currently working on, features that take a longer time to bake. We’re sure you’ll love them. And we showed sneak peeks of them at conferences last week in San Francisco at Layers and New York at Awwwards. Look it up on social media if you’re curious 😉
Our main focus is to keep the quality bar high, and you should be able to use all of our available features without a problem. We are redefining what Beta software means. If you are curious on how we’re building XD, check out the article Making Adobe XD, by our Director of Engineering Vincent Hardy.
Check back as we’re adding new features to Adobe XD on a regular basis.
Tell Us What You Think!
Our team thrives on feedback and is passionate about our mission to deliver a product that experience designers want to use to design the next generation of digital experiences. Download the latest version of Adobe Experience Design and let us know what you think.
Talk to us on Twitter (@AdobeXD), post your comments below, share ideas with fellow designers in our forums and help shape the future of Adobe XD by submitting feature ideas or issues on our UserVoice feedback site.