Experience Design CC (or Adobe XD) is a new tool from Adobe for design, prototyping and presentation.
For whom?
Product was created for designers, creative teams and organizations that need to create on a large scale. Advanced functions make it easy to organize joint work on one project in real time.
Advantages of Adobe XD
A serious advantage of Adobe’s product over its competitors is its multi-platform nature, as well as fast and stable operation regardless of the operating system. By the way, the program is available for both Windows and macOS. In addition, it’s included in the Adobe Creative Cloud package, which means that the product has good compatibility with the rest of the designer tools from the Adobe CC package.
Bit of story
The product entered the market and immediately announced itself loudly. Then the first wave of new plugins started. In middle of 2019, Adobe XD was officially declared open, and then even major services such as Dribbble, Stark and Airtable began to adapt their tools specifically to XD. A little later, other companies «pulled up» with their solutions: UserTesting, Trello, Google Cloud.
TOP 10 plugins for Adobe XD
Nowadays, the fresh version already operates with a decent number of plugins, including solutions for automation, synchronization, collaboration, publishing, developer tools, etc.
Many plugins have become a critical addition to the standard Experience Design functionality, due to the fact that, thanks to some solutions, designers and designers save hundreds of hours on saving and transferring files to other software, linking layouts, etc.
UI Faces
UI Faces combines photos (user avatars) and tags with attributes related to age, gender, emotions and hair color to make finding the desired image as fast and easy as possible. This Adobe XD plugin allows designers to select options for these attributes and fill any selected shape with a single click.
Color Ranger
It allows designers to easily enhance colors in designs. You no longer need to edit every element in Photoshop, regardless of the brightness, saturation, hue, color depth, or opacity of individual elements or entire artboards. Color Ranger also lets you save and manage presets, which means creating themes or editing UI kits can be done with just one click.
Stark
Stark is an inclusive plugin that tests contrast and simulates forms of color blindness.
The main goal for designers and companies is to make design accessible to everyone. Stark provides the ability to test contrast and simulate color-blind design shapes right in Adobe XD, so it helps you design and create accessible, ethical and inclusive products.
Rename
We spend a lot of time organizing and renaming layers and artboards. Rename allows you to easily and quickly rename all layers sequentially, in ascending or descending order, as well as change the case of the layer name. Also, using simple keyboard shortcuts, you can find and replace words or symbols.
Change Case
It’s a simple and powerful plugin that allows users to change the capitalization of text in XD. It seems that the features of this plugin are not that great, but in reality it saves a lot of time.
Google Sheets
It allows you to import an actual copy into an Adobe XD document from a Google Sheets document. Even if the content in your Google Sheets document changes, you can still update the copy in your document.
Trello
It’s a productive platform that allows users and entire teams to organize productive collaboration. With the Trello plugin, designers can easily submit their artwork to XD, allowing them to share artboards with the team without leaving Adobe XD.
Angle
From time to time, a designer needs to share their work as a presentation. The deterioration of quality in static screens is a big letdown for designers. Everyone is familiar with this workflow: open your layout in Photoshop and export your design there. Angle lets you do the same without leaving Adobe XD. Thanks to this plugin, it takes much less time to add something more polished to your presentation or upload a shot to Dribbble.
Icondrop
Icondrop makes millions of design resources available with a single click giving you access to icons, illustrations and photos without leaving Adobe XD. With a simple search function and easy access to previous downloads, Icondrop will soon be able to create layouts on the fly.
Web Export
This plugin lets you export HTML and CSS from your XD files. It offers nested layouts, centered constraints, the ability to add additional styles, attributes and markup.
Adobe XD is called Super-Photoshop for Super-prototyping. It’s the fastest and most reliable UX design solution on the market for companies of 10 or 10 000 hired workers.