What's new in Adobe XD

The October 2018 release of XD has the following new exciting features:

• Design and prototype using voice commands and speech playback
• Authoring and playback with auto-animate and drag gestures
• Cross-document asset sharing with linked symbols
• Design tooling innovation through plugins
• Seamless assets transfer with After Effects and Illustrator
• Win10 live device preview on iOS

Adobe XD provides an easy-to-use solution that lets you use voice commands to trigger an interaction between artboards. Like using a Click or a Tap as a Trigger, you can use Voice to trigger a prototype interaction and Speech Playback as a triggered action. Speech playback gives you access to a powerful text-to-speech engine that helps you design for new platforms like voice assistants and smart speakers. For more information, see Voice design and prototyping.

To learn more about using voice commands and speech playback, check this video.

Auto-Animate allows you to easily create prototypes with immersive animated transitions. Simply duplicate an artboard, modify object properties, such as size, position, rotation, and apply an Auto-Animate action to create an animated transition between artboards. To use Auto-Animate, ensure that the objects you want to animate have the same layer name between two artboards. For more information, see Create prototypes using auto-animate.

Drag Gesture in XD takes the Auto-Animate feature one step further by allowing you to simulate the drag experience of touch-enabled devices. For more information, see Drag gestures at work.

To learn more about Auto-Animate, check this video.

As design teams grow within organizations coupled with the ever-increasing design surfaces, designers need to collaborate to create consistent and scalable designs. With Linked Symbols, designers can share symbols across documents and ensure that they are always up to date.

Linked Symbols allow you to create and maintain a single source of truth for UI kits, sticker sheets or style guides, and use them in other Adobe XD documents. When you modify a Linked Symbol in the source document, XD notifies documents with instances of that Linked Symbol with those updates. From there, you can preview the changes and choose to accept or reject them. For more information, see Work with linked symbols.

To learn more about Linked Symbols, check this video.

Adobe XD launches the first wave of plugins that helps you automate tasks, integrate with other tools, leverage data in your designs, and much more. This also includes integrations with some of the best collaboration and productivity apps in the market, including Slack, JIRA, and Microsoft Teams.

For information on getting started with plugins, see Plugins for XD.

From Adobe XD 13.0, you can transfer layout designs and assets from Illustrator by opening. ai files from within Adobe XD. The new fast and convenient workflow helps you to seamlessly transfer assets with native mapping of layers, artboards, artwork, and vectors with best visual fidelity, and streamline collaborative environments in different stages of UX process. For more information, see Open Illustrator files in XD.

Feature benefits:

• Seamless usage of Illustrator assets in prototypes: transfer icons, logos, and other vector assets into XD and use UI Kits or full libraries created in Illustrator yet retain layers, with full editability and visual fidelity.
• Collaborate to create interactive designs: open Illustrator files in XD and use XD’s powerful prototyping and collaboration features.

To learn more about Illustrator integration, check this video.

With Adobe XD 13.0, you can easily export XD designs (selected layers or whole artboards) into After Effects to create custom UI animations and micro-interactions. You can seamlessly export layers, artboards, artwork, and vectors with equal visual fidelity and use After Effect’s powerful plugin ecosystem to streamline your collaboration with the developers. For more information, see Exporting assets to After Effects.

Feature benefits:

• Get full control of your animations: Designers can use After Effects to create custom animations and micro-interactions, tweak transitions, or use video assets in your designs.
• Seamless asset transfer: With this integration, you can enjoy quick asset transfer and native mapping of layers, vectors, and artwork resulting in faster turnaround from design to custom animations.
• Leverage plugins: You can extend your animations and collaboration with developers by using After Effects’ plugin ecosystem tailored for UX design process.

From XD 13.0 onwards, designers with Windows OS can use a USB connection to preview their designs on iOS. For more information, see Preview on mobile devices.