7 XD plugins for designing with real copy

When it comes to creating good user experiences, you can’t underestimate the power of good copy. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the new UX Copywriting & Localization collection in Adobe XD’s plugin manager. The collection includes some of our favorite plugins that can help you translate your designs to other languages, upload production-ready texts, and collaborate with copywriters within a unified workspace. Click here to see the new collection and download the featured plugins.

Whether you’re designing websites, apps, or marketing campaign assets, bringing real copy into your designs can help move design concepts closer to the final product. Lorem ipsum can only get you so far when you’re sharing designs with clients; integrating live copy, on the other hand, can speed up the review process for everyone involved. And when it comes to localization, consider how a bit of copy in your language might look when translated to a different one – from layout challenges to considering the various cultural nuances that a certain region may require. Brands that simply translate designs miss the opportunity to connect with people in their native language. Having the right tools for localizing your designs can help you effectively communicate your brand and product message to your entire global audience.

To help you bring real copy into your XD designs, this collection of plugins will empower you to work with copywriters, localization teams, and content strategists in your process to design with production-ready copy and translations.

Read on to learn more about the plugins in this collection!

Avocode Write

Avocode is a design handoff tool for development, copywriting, and design review workflows. Today, thousands of teams use Avocode as the ultimate source of truth to work with design files and to build digital products with outstanding interface design, faster.

The new Avocode Write plugin enables you to hand off Adobe XD artboards for copywriting, text editing, proofreading, review, and development. With Avocode Write, all of your team’s stakeholders, content creators, UX writers, copywriters, and even clients can suggest copy edits in XD designs in the browser – without accidental design changes. Avocode Write checks the length of copy in text fields. If the design needs to change based on copy, you can sync text edits from Avocode Write back to Adobe XD via the plugin.

Crowdin

With the Crowdin plugin for Adobe XD, you can use real text in your designs, create new text copy, quickly generate multilingual assets, and share designs with your translation team for context.

Designers can edit the source strings or add new ones when working in Adobe XD and send them to Crowdin for translation, along with the context for translators. When source texts are uploaded to a Crowdin project by marketing or development teams, designers can get the list of all the source strings and add them to their designs in a click. This plugin also helps to create multilingual marketing visuals like brochures and banners faster. To support continuous localization workflow, texts from Crowdin can be automatically sent to developers.

Google Sheets

Created by Silicon Valley digital product studio Impekable, the Adobe XD Google Sheets plugin enables design teams to decouple content from the design, allowing copywriters, content marketers, and editors to make content changes as they come up. Business teams can collaborate on content directly in Google Sheets, a de facto collaboration tool in many organizations, and designers can work on the design without interruptions for content changes. Content can be easily imported or refreshed at any time, so that their designs will always have the latest information.

Lokalise

Lokalise is an all-in-one translation management tool for developers, managers, translators, and designers, providing advanced features for all stakeholders involved in the localization process.

The Lokalise plugin for Adobe XD simplifies the process of design localization by exchanging design content, translations, and screenshots between XD and the translation management tool. You can push text elements to Lokalise so your team of professional linguists can translate the texts. All text elements will be pushed to Lokalise together with screenshots, providing your translators with enough context to make a high-quality translation in the target language.

Docs 2 Design

Docs 2 Design is a plugin for Adobe XD from Em Software that enables collaboration on text content with your stakeholders and wordsmiths, using the tools they are familiar with — Excel, Word, plain text editors, or Google Sheets — connecting the world of ordinary documents to XD.

Docs 2 Design works by extracting your XD document text and placing it in standard editing environments. Then, when edits are made to it, the plugin updates the text back in Adobe XD. You maintain ownership of the content in XD throughout the entire process. Docs 2 Design can also connect with other software systems using its machine-readable snapshots, and it has an “X-ray” facility that gives you visibility into your content changes at each step.

Frontitude

Frontitude centralizes UX copy editing and collaboration for UX and product teams, from design to production. Just like design systems help designers create a consistent design, Frontitude also makes it easier for teams to keep a consistent voice and tone throughout their product copy.

Frontitude for Adobe XD connects your design mockups with Frontitude, for managing your UX copy with a single source of truth. This integration completes Adobe XD by giving you a clear overview of your UX copy and helps to ensure a consistent voice throughout your product content with advanced search, tagging, text-first collaboration, version control, and more.

ContentSync

ContentSync connects your complex designs to powerful spreadsheets so you can create dynamic content versioning systems with the power of formulas and collaboration.

Connect your spreadsheet to your design to quickly create and iterate your content with a click. ContentSync supports syncing to Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, reusing a single piece of content throughout your design, and changing images dynamically per version.

Incorporating production-ready copy into your UI designs is a key part of the design process, especially as you’re designing user experiences for different surfaces and regions. With these plugins, you’ll be able to bring real content into your designs and preview translated copy as you design different experiences in Adobe XD.

Try out the plugins by visiting the new UX Copywriting & Localization collection in the Adobe XD Plugin Manager.