December Update of Adobe XD

It’s December! With the holidays and the end of the year, the XD team is delivering one last release for 2017 with more of the features that you’ve been asking for, including improvements to working with type (like underline text) and the ability to edit graphics in Photoshop from the CC Libraries window.

Want to see these updates in action? Check out AdobeLive from Dec. 12-14 to see top UX designers using the latest features in Adobe XD.

Design enhancements.

Underline text.

With over a thousand votes in User Voice and feedback from many customers that text underline was a must from day one, we have been working hard to provide this feature. Though it seems like it would be a small task, we had overcome a few hurdles but we are thrilled to deliver a high-quality experience. While other tools simply draw a line under text, XD’s text underline feature leaves space for descenders. This creates a beautiful result for both script and non-script typefaces.

Underline any text elements or sub ranges of text elements using a button in the Text section of the property inspector or using the shortcut, CMD+U/CTRL+U.

Stroke align type.

This update adds the ability to control a stroke’s position on any object, giving you more control over how borders appear on shapes and closed paths. Previous to this release, basic objects — like rectangles and ellipses — had an inside stroke and other objects — like paths, lines, and Boolean groups — had a center-aligned stroke. With this release, you can select a closed object and modify the stroke’s position similar to the “Align Stroke” property in Illustrator.

These options include — Outside, Inside, and Center.

Both underline and stroke alignment are set when importing vector assets like SVG, or copying and pasting from Illustrator.

Creative Cloud Libraries enhancements.

The XD team is continuing to improve the workflows between XD and Adobe’s other tools and services. For example, the right-click menu added an “Edit…” option which opens bitmap assets in Photoshop. Any saved edits to the image in Photoshop also update in your XD document. You can now seamlessly edit bitmap images used in XD from Creative Cloud Libraries with Photoshop.

Also, using Adobe Stock content just got easier! When using unlicensed Adobe Stock content in XD, a simple right-click from the CC Libraries window now allows you to license assets more quickly from the Adobe Stock website. Once licensing is complete, all instances of that asset are immediately updated.

Publishing enhancements.

Once you are ready to share your design for feedback, you can explore some new options when publishing a prototype. Both of these options were repeatedly requested by our community to help make user testing and presentation easier.

First, you now have the option to turn off hotspot hints. Hotspot hints are the blue highlights that flash over objects that trigger interactions. These hints would flash when a user clicked in an area with no interaction. While this is useful in some cases, the hints were problematic for people conducting user tests. Now, when publishing a prototype, you can uncheck the “Show Hotspot Hints” option to turn these blue hints off.

The other new option is “Open in Full Screen,” which returns a link that will open a prototype directly in full-screen mode, which is the preferred presentation for a lot of people. When viewing the link, a reviewer will still have the ability to press ESC to get out of this mode.

Design Specs enhancements.

Since our first release of Design Specs (Beta) last month, we’ve been busy improving the onboarding experience. We want to ensure that your developers know how to navigate and get information from these specs. For example, when a developer first views all of the artboards, they will get a tip on how to navigate around your design.

In addition, Design Specs (Beta) is now available in all of XD’s supported languages! Designers using localized versions of XD for French, German, Korean, and Japanese will now be able to view their language in the Design Specs web links. Developers receiving specs will view specs in the language set by their browser.

We are continuing to improve and add functionality to Design Specs (Beta), so look out for more future updates.

Additional customer-driven enhancements.

Our team continues to listen to your feedback, which comes from face to face meetings, UserVoice, Twitter, or Adobe Forums. In addition to a lot of bug fixes, we’ve also tackled some of these smaller requests. You can now:

Get the latest update of Adobe XD.

Download the December 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.