Adobe had announced that Adobe XD is opening its platform to enable users to customise their tools with an ecosystem of community and partner-built plugins. Leveraging Adobe XD APIs, developers can now build on top of Adobe XD, adding new features, automating workflows and connecting XD to the tools and services designers use every day.
Also, Adobe XD now tightly integrates with designers’ existing workflows via other popular collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams (Adobe’s preferred collaboration service), Slack and Jira Software Cloud, making it easy for designers to collaborate with stakeholders across their organisations.
Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President for Creative Cloud at Adobe, Scott Belsky said:
“We are committed to developing a rich ecosystem around Adobe XD to fit the modern designer’s needs. Delivering seamless, engaging user experiences is imperative for brands, companies and all digital products, and Adobe is focused on serving designers with powerful collaboration capabilities.”
The open platform will be made publicly available later this year, but Adobe is already working with early developer partners to build plugins for XD, including Microsoft, Trello, UserTesting, Airtable, Dribbble, Silicon Publishing, Slope, inMotionNow, Astute Graphics, Anima and Google Cloud, along with its Behance and Stock services.
New Third-Party Integrations
To streamline and reduce friction in collaboration, Adobe announced add-ins for Microsoft Teams, Slack and Jira.
- Available now, Microsoft Teams and Slack now both offer richer previews of Creative Cloud assets and notifications when comments are made on Adobe XD prototypes.
- Coming later this year, developers in Jira can easily access information on shared Adobe XD prototypes, and design specs, streamlining the hand-off process between designers and developers.
These solutions complement a series of integrations Adobe announced earlier this year, offering friction-free workflows with popular third-party tools and services such as Dropbox, Sketch, Zeplin, Avocode, ProtoPie and Sympli.
$10 Million Fund to Empower Creative Innovation
Adobe today also revealed the first recipients of the Adobe Fund for Design. Created in May, the $10 million fund, distributed in the form of grants and equity investments, provides support to empower designers and developers to innovate in the world of experience design and create plugins and integrations for Adobe XD. In addition to financial support, Adobe provides recipients of the fund’s investments with access to industry experts, early access to technology, partnership and go-to-market opportunities and exposure to Adobe’s network of passionate customers.
Initial grants and investments include individuals and companies building tools and services on top of Adobe XD to empower designers around the globe with several expected to be available in the product later this year.
- CloudApp – Video, webcam, screenshot annotation and GIF creation securely in the cloud.
- Protoio, Inc., makers of Overflow – Empowers designers to design, present and share beautiful user flow diagrams that tell a story.
- Stark – Helps you design and build products that are accessible, ethical and inclusive.
- Florian Schulz, Maker of Ratio – Maker of design tools for user interface typographers.
- Precious Design Studio – A studio that helps innovators shape meaningful products and services that people love to interact with, as well as design tools such as Data Populator and Open Color Tools.
- Odin Chart – Tyler Wolf, is a data visualisation designer building Odin Chart, a designer-friendly tool that makes creating charts for digital products and publications a breeze.
- Iconscout by Chamestudio – High-quality Icons, Illustrations and stock photos in one place.
- Impekable – Digital agency specialising in user experience design and enterprise software engineering.
- UI Faces – Avatars for design mockups.
- Prototypr.io – The community platform for designers to share their work and stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest design tools and news.
- Modulz – A visual code editor for designing and building digital user interfaces – without writing code.
- Design+Code – The team behind the popular design and coding courses and the Angle plugin.
- Yummygum – Creates tasty looking designs and refreshing experiences for web and mobile.
Enhancements in Adobe XD
Earlier this month, Adobe also released several new features in Adobe XD, which streamline designers’ workflows and facilitate the designer-to-developer handoff process to make coordination faster and simpler than ever before. Marquee new features include the ability to extract assets in Design Specs, making it more productive and efficient to work with developers. First released in November 2017, Design Specs is also no longer in beta and designers can now mark assets for export and give developers the ability to extract them in the format they need to be used in their code.
Pricing and Availability
The Starter plan for Adobe XD is available at xd.adobe.com. This free plan complements additional Adobe XD offerings, including for individuals, teams and enterprises.
The $9.99 Adobe XD Single App plan gives Creative Cloud members unlimited shared prototypes and design specs. Additional details on plan options and pricing for each tier are available on Adobe’s website.
