Adobe XD Articles

Hi Andrew, first of all, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this interview. To get started, can you please give us a little intro about yourself and about what you do at Adobe?

Hey there, it’s my pleasure to take part in this interview.

My name is Andrew Shorten and I’ve been leading product management on Adobe XD for about four years (since we started the project), but have been at Adobe for 10+ years, joining through the acquisition of Macromedia. I’m based in the San Francisco Bay Area, but originally from the UK.

On pretty much any kind of software, your day to day productivity is directly proportional to the number of shortcuts you know.

Same goes for Adobe XD: you need to learn a few shortcuts to be able to enjoy the real speed of working with this tool. Take the time to learn them, we promise that your workflow will greatly benefit from it in the long run!

In this page, we listed pretty much every available shortcut for Adobe XD, and we grouped them by usefulness.

Back in February 2017, we thought it would be cool to create a private group on Facebook for all those UI/UX designers using Adobe XD, or for anyone interested in it and planning to try it in the future.

Right now, this group is counting more than 5000 members, and it keeps on growing!

The group is called “Adobe XD & Friends” and it’s a place to connect, ask questions, solve issues, showcase your work or just post useful links and resources.

Why don’t you join too? It’s free!

JOIN THE GROUP

The moment a lot of Windows based UI/UX designers have been waiting for has finally come: Adobe XD has been just launched for Windows 10.

Adobe mentioned it would be coming out by “Late 2016” and it seems like they kept their promise.

XD is only available for Windows 10, and it’s been built as a proper Universal Windows Platform (UWP), the first one ever made by Adobe.

This choice was made as they wanted to focus on a modern development ecosystem allowing them to obtain the best possible performance, make proper use of the latest touch-enabled hardware and build a “future proof” app which will run on all next generation Windows devices.

For several years Adobe Photoshop has been the tool of choice for designers wanting to create web sites, mobile apps and user interfaces in general.

Then in 2010, the new kid on the block made its appearance on the market: Sketch, from Bohemian’s coding.

Especially in the last couple of years, it became a great alternative to Photoshop: cheaper and completely dedicated to UI/UX designers, it gradually stole a lot of designers’ hearts and went on to form a loyal and growing community.

Still, a lot of designers never left the Adobe ecosystem as you can’t really do everything with Sketch, and most importantly, this software is only available on Mac, so all Windows users could never switch to it even if they wanted to (unless you run Mac OS on a virtual machine or come up with similar hacks).

So how many people are still using Photoshop for UI design? Hard to say, but my guess is A LOT.

I still see plenty of new UI .psd resources sold on marketplaces like Themeforest or UI8 (UI kits, icon sets, ..), lots of Photoshop tutorials and courses are still being posted on Youtube, Udemy, Lynda and the likes, many projects made with PS are still appearing on Behance, and so on..

Hell, I also never stopped using Photoshop for most of my older projects, even though I use a mix of Adobe XD and Sketch for my new ones.

But things are finally changing for all these happy (or not so happy) Photoshop users: the time for a big shift is coming very soon.

Adobe Experience Design is here.