Have a question to ask or an idea to share? Come and participate in Adobe XD Community. We would love to hear from you and see your creations!
Looking for information on how to manage document assets in XD? You're in the right place!
Document Assets panel is the central location from where you can create, manage, and share colors, character styles, components, and audio assets used in your design projects.
Meet Richard, a design lead responsible for standardizing the creation and usage of design assets in cloud-based systems. He is training himself to manage colors, character styles, components, or audio assets across design systems.
Read on to learn how we can introduce him to Document Assets in XD and help him get started.
Be familiar with these concepts in XD:
To start curating your design styles and components, click Libraries in the toolbar, or press Cmd + Shift + Y (on Mac) or Ctrl + Shift + Y (on Windows), to open the Document Assets panel
.
Once you are in the Document Assets panel, follow these steps to add colors, character styles, components, audio, or video that you want to reuse across your document or publish later as part of your library.
Add audio
Add video
Now that you can view the added assets from the Document Assets, select an object or a group of objects on the artboard, and click the color or character style to apply it to the selection.
To use one or multiple components in your design, select them in the Document Assets panel and drag them to canvas. Instances of those components will be created on canvas.
Follow these steps to reuse color, character styles, or components:
Reuse color
Reuse components
Once you have added and reused your assets, you can edit them from Document Assets to make global changes across your document. This facility provides a streamlined way to modify your color and character styles across the document.
Before you proceed, ensure that you are editing the correct asset:
Follow these steps to edit document assets:
Edit colors
Edit character styles
Edit components
After you add assets, you can manage and organize them in the Document Assets panel in the following ways:
To learn how to group assets, see Organize assets into groups and subgroups.
View and sort assets
You can add, reuse, and edit assets in both views.
Search and filter assets
Use Search to search for assets.
Use Filter by Type to filter the document assets by Colors, Character Styles, or Components. For more, see Search and filter assets.
Hover over assets
Hover over asset thumbnails to reveal the following information:
Reorder, rename, and delete assets
Organize your document assets easily by creating any number of groups and subgroups in the Document Assets panel, in tree view or path view:
In both tree view and path view, you can organize assets in the following ways:
Create groups within each asset category (Colors, Character Styles, and so on) in any of the following ways:
Once you create a group, right-click it to do any of the following:
Once you create your groups and subgroups, you can drag assets to move them to those groups. Alternatively, right-click the assets, select Move to, and choose the groups you want to move the assets to.
You can create multiple nested subgroups at once using forward slashes (/) in the group path, and organize assets easily by editing paths. To learn more, see Organize assets using forward slashes.
Use forward slashes (/) to easily organize groups and subgroups within any asset category. You can perform the following tasks using forward slashes:
Create a group with nested subgroups
Create multiple nested subgroups inside a group at once using forward slashes (/).
You can create nested subgroups using forward slashes in:
After you type in a group name, add a forward slash, type in the subgroup name, and nest as many levels as required. If a subgroup with the same name already exists at a nesting level, the two subgroups will merge.
Edit paths to ungroup and move assets
Using the power of path edits, perform multiple Ungroup functions at once, or combine Move to and Ungroup functions.
You can edit paths in:
Double-click the path to edit it. When you remove a group or subgroup from a path, all the assets inside it move up one level. You can remove any number of nesting levels from a path at once and move up assets multiple levels. When you type in a path that already exists, all the assets move to that path.
a. Replace slashes with dashes (—) and retain the group hierarchy.
b. Convert slashes into new nesting levels and add depth to the group hierarchy.
To get some pro tips on organizing your document assets, watch this video:
Now that you have created all your reusable colors, character styles, and components in your document assets, learn how to use Creative Cloud Libraries to publish and share your design system assets with the rest of your team.
To learn more about working with Assets, watch this video:
We've got you started on how to work with assets and libraries in XD. Take a step forward and learn how to use Libraries to share your assets, components, and designs systems or migrate your existing XD cloud document to Libraries.
Have a question to ask or an idea to share? Come and participate in Adobe XD Community. We would love to hear from you and see your creations!
Sign in to your account