Some of these requested features just seem strange to me, and I would actually suggest that Adobe XD creators not even waste their time on them.
It’s their product, so I’m all for it being up to them. (They can choose to ignore me, if they’d like.)
Screens are limited by pixels, so why would you need to create something (especially for positioning or alignment, which is the purpose of guides) that lives in a magical realm of half a pixel? A pixel cannot light up "half-way".
Screen designers typically work in iOS points, or Android dp, or CSS px, and all the templates in XD are set up this way. Given high DPI displays, one unit in XD typically relates to 2 or 3 screen pixels when running on the device. Positioning something at 0.5 in XD would mean lighting up a full pixel when actually shown on a 2× device (iPhone XR etc).
For icon design, sub-pixel placement is valuable anyway, but it’s worth noting that one unit in XD typically doesn’t map directly to a single screen pixel — they’re often multiples.
I believe you can do this in Illustrator because this is a vector program, so it is not pixel-based, it is mathematical based and has infinite scalability.
In a general sense, vector shapes in Illustrator, Photoshop, XD, Sketch etc are all infinitely scalable. Of all those tools, XD is actually the only one that doesn’t have a canvas pixel preview. All the others do.
Why would you want guides in prototyping mode? This is the presentation mode, when you aren't aligning or moving anything around. Why would guides exist in this space?
You can move objects around in prototyping mode. When you move objects in prototyping mode, the other snapping positions work as they do in design mode — there’s center and canvas edge snapping. Given all that…
Other features you mentioned seemed very niche to me like copying guides between documents.
That’s possible now, via the guide copy and paste feature. My apologies for missing it in my initial post (I could see the feature, but it was disabled until I selected an artboard).
Copying guides between documents is pretty handy if you’ve split a project into separate documents, or have a design system, or for many other reasons.
Yes, multiple color guides would be cool, but then again Photoshop doesn't even have that and that program is 25+ years old.
You can set the guide colour under Preferences › Guides, Grid and Slices though. Double clicking a guide in Photoshop jumps to the preferences to change the colour. Please note that I just asked for a way to change guide colour, not for a way to have individual guide colours.
As someone who uses Adobe XD frequently, very few of these complaints felt justified.
My biggest complaint by far is the lack of colour management. Everything you draw in XD is objectively the wrong colour, and way too vibrant on wide gamut displays.
And since they all focus around guides, I think there is a lot more to unpack in this program than just the guides.
I chose to offer feedback only on guides. I find a lot of the choices made in XD’s other features equally frustrating.
It’s their product, so I’m all for it being up to them. (They can choose to ignore me, if they’d like.)
Screen designers typically work in iOS points, or Android dp, or CSS px, and all the templates in XD are set up this way. Given high DPI displays, one unit in XD typically relates to 2 or 3 screen pixels when running on the device. Positioning something at 0.5 in XD would mean lighting up a full pixel when actually shown on a 2× device (iPhone XR etc).
For icon design, sub-pixel placement is valuable anyway, but it’s worth noting that one unit in XD typically doesn’t map directly to a single screen pixel — they’re often multiples.
In a general sense, vector shapes in Illustrator, Photoshop, XD, Sketch etc are all infinitely scalable. Of all those tools, XD is actually the only one that doesn’t have a canvas pixel preview. All the others do.
You can move objects around in prototyping mode. When you move objects in prototyping mode, the other snapping positions work as they do in design mode — there’s center and canvas edge snapping. Given all that…
That’s possible now, via the guide copy and paste feature. My apologies for missing it in my initial post (I could see the feature, but it was disabled until I selected an artboard).
Copying guides between documents is pretty handy if you’ve split a project into separate documents, or have a design system, or for many other reasons.
You can set the guide colour under Preferences › Guides, Grid and Slices though. Double clicking a guide in Photoshop jumps to the preferences to change the colour. Please note that I just asked for a way to change guide colour, not for a way to have individual guide colours.
My biggest complaint by far is the lack of colour management. Everything you draw in XD is objectively the wrong colour, and way too vibrant on wide gamut displays.
I chose to offer feedback only on guides. I find a lot of the choices made in XD’s other features equally frustrating.
We can talk about them, if you’d like.