The New Adobe XD Ecosystem: Supercharging Design Workflows with Third-Party Plugins

As a designer, the demands on your time seem to increase every day. You’re pushed to do more, and you need to do it faster and more efficiently than ever before. You likely depend on dozens of tools to get your ideas from design to production, which often creates friction and takes a lot of time. As powerful and performant as Adobe XD is for designing and prototyping, we know it doesn’t have every feature that experience designers need, and we know it doesn’t connect with every other service in the design workflow. That’s why we’ve been working hard to create the XD developer platform and ecosystem, finding the best individuals and companies to build integrations that extend XD, unlock workflows, add useful functionality, and make XD the perfect all-in-one tool for you.

To everyone in the design community calling out for plugins since the launch of Adobe XD – we’ve been listening to you. Soon, with XD APIs, developers will be able to build new features, automate workflows, and connect XD to the tools and services designers use every day.

Whether you want the ability to design with real data or check your designs against accessibility standards, or you want to automate repetitive tasks like renaming art boards, or you want to connect to your favourite collaboration or project management service, you’ll soon have an ecosystem of plugins to help. And, if you don’t find the one you’re looking for – or you have a crazy idea you want to explore – the platform will be open, so you can build it yourself!

The XD extensibility APIs and initial set of plugins will be available later this year, but we’re excited to announce some of the first companies and products we’ve been working with. You’ll be able to extend XD with plugins for products and companies like: Microsoft, Google Cloud, Trello, UserTesting, Airtable, Dribbble, Silicon Publishing, Slope, inMotionNow, Astute Graphics, Anima, our own Behance and Stock services, and many more.

Adobe Fund for Design first recipients will empower UX designers

Additionally, in May we announced the Adobe Fund for Design, $10 million to support innovative people and emerging companies that are building tools and services to empower designers around the world. Today, we’re also thrilled to announce the first recipients of this fund:

The Adobe Fund for Design is distributed in the form of grants and equity investments and provides support to designers, developers, and entrepreneurs innovating in the world of experience design and integrating with Creative Cloud. The conviction these teams and individuals share is inspiring and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them to shape the future of design and creativity.

These plugins will push the boundaries of XD and will be available right from within the application.

Adobe XD users will be able to easily access and install plugins for other tools right inside the program.

By opening the Adobe XD platform, we’ll supercharge design workflows by enabling users to customise their tools with an ecosystem of community and partner-built plugins. This brings us closer to our goal of creating a full end-to-end UX/UI design experience with XD, empowering our customers with game-changing products and Creative Cloud-powered experiences wherever and however they work.

Download the latest release of Adobe XD here.

UX Community

We’d love to continue the dialogue! Help us shape the future of Adobe XD by submitting feature requests or file bugs at https://adobexd.uservoice.com. You can follow our handle @AdobeXD for updates or reach the team on Twitter using the #AdobeXD. You can also talk to us using Facebook, where we share videos and updates as well as answer questions during live sessions.

#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.