Advancing Experience Design with Adobe XD

I’m excited about the major announcements we’re making today about Adobe XD, our application for designing and prototyping websites, mobile apps, and other experiences. This release also embodies a lot of what makes me so excited to be back at Adobe. We’re developing a platform that will help user experience designers embrace new interfaces and facilitate the broad collaboration that is essential to moving their projects forward.

There was a time when design was a last-minute addition hurriedly bolted onto a product before it was rushed out to market. No longer. Designers, with their ability to connect deeply with the needs of consumers and push the boundaries of how products work, are now the glue that holds modern projects together. And their importance will only increase as interfaces evolve and become more central to a product’s success. After all, so much of life and work now rely upon interfaces and digital experiences. From the dashboards of our cars, health monitors in hospitals, to the tools we use, and every screen we rely on to find our way or just get away — every experience is crafted by passionate designers in a relentless pursuit to simplify and enhance daily life.

The incredible group of designers and engineers building Adobe XD recognizes the gravity of this opportunity. Not only must we build a cross-platform screen design application with every feature you’d expect, but it must have industrial-grade performance and a level of interoperability with other tools, like Photoshop, that only Adobe can deliver. I encourage you to open your largest screen design file with hundreds (or thousands) of artboards in Adobe XD to see the performance for yourself. Still, this is not enough. We must also find ways to make experience design more productive and powerful by a step-function. By integrating design and prototyping, and developing novel ways to outfit designers for new mediums such as augmented reality (AR), we aspire to bring the field of experience design to a new level. For us, it’s not just an opportunity — it’s a responsibility.

We want to give everyone a chance to try XD, so today we’re announcing a new, free Adobe XD Plan. With the Starter Plan, everyone from students, to professional designers, to any creative person with an idea for a project will have free access to the tool that many top designers and progressive brands, like Sonos, Boosted Boards, Equinox, and Microsoft are adopting to develop their websites and mobile apps. Download XD and see for yourself.

I am also thrilled about the roadmap ahead. With today’s announcement, we are also adding new features and improvements to XD — as we do every month — to ensure that XD is the best experience design platform on the market.

But we also know that designers don’t rely on just one tool. We’re committed to making it easy for developers to build extensions and add-ons that connect XD, and all of Creative Cloud, with a wealth of other design tools. As part of that investment in the design community, we’ve established the Adobe Fund for Design, with up to $10 million allocated in the form of investments or grants to cultivate an ecosystem of integrations in Creative Cloud, starting with Adobe XD.

I know that Adobe isn’t the only company building for experience designers, but I’m confident we can succeed because of the team we’ve assembled to work on Adobe XD, our commitment to speed and performance, the ecosystem we are building, and the tremendous amount of research and technology we’re using to accelerate the field.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible team working every day to make Adobe XD exceed your expectations. I suggest you follow Andrew Shorten, XD’s product manager, on Twitter to get his own flavor of updates. I am also awestruck by the momentum among the designers, engineers, and researchers in our organization. That includes industry leaders like Khoi Vinh, the former design director at The New York Times and Etsy, and one of the most respected voices in the user experience design community, and Val Head, who literally wrote the book on designing interface animation. You can learn more about the XD team in the video above and in this blog post.

We’ve made exciting strides with XD, but we’re far from finished. The team is heads-down working on more innovations. Stay tuned for great things to come.