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Design Specs - Going to Production with Adobe XD

almost 5 years ago from , Design Product Marketing @ Adobe

Note: For those of you adding questions or comments after 2pm PDT, we will respond during the following workday (most of our team is based in San Francisco). Thanks and have a good day or night!

Hi everyone,

This is Mike from the XD product marketing team. I’m here with my colleagues Harish Narayan and Arun Kaza from the XD product management team to talk about design specs and handing off your designs to your developers for production.

Back in November 2017 we launched design specs. Since then we’ve continued to add functionality to design specs with:

  • Commenting
  • Password protection
  • Layout grids
  • Various enhancements to make it faster and easier to read measurements, navigate, work with UI elements and masked layers

Our team is here from now to 2pm PDT to chat and answer your questions.

Thanks,

Mike

Built openly with community feedback, our goal is to build the best solution for UX design and prototyping. Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook, or UserVoice, and check out what other designers have created with XD.

19 comments

  • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, almost 5 years ago

    Before adding any other features, XD needs to be colour managed.

    Currently, you can not draw a solid rectangle in XD and have it shown as the correct colour. This is immediately apparent on wide gamut displays, but it is also an issue on other devices. This is such a fundamental and mandatory feature for any and every design tool, and I can not use or recommend XD at all until it is addressed.

    Forget about specs and handoff. Forget about working with developers. Forget about every other thing you might have on the product roadmap. Nothing else matters until XD is colour managed.

    25 points
    • Matt KelshMatt Kelsh, almost 5 years ago

      Big +1 here.

      The last thing devs on a delivery team need to deal with is assets with inconsistent colour spaces. No designer will want their assets to export in a way that looks insane once it hits a device.

      Mike: Good on you for getting XD this far. Please, slow the f down before you burden teams by calling this production ready. It will be eventually, but it certainly isn't now.

      4 points
    • Alexandru NăstaseAlexandru Năstase, almost 5 years ago

      So so so much agree on this!! — Tried to do a project in Adobe XD saw no color management, switched software Mike...

      2 points
  • Jernej Horvat, almost 5 years ago

    Hi. Do you plan to integrate the ability to create flows? Since we create prototypes in XD already, it could automatically create flow diagrams without any extra work.

    3 points
    • Harish Narayan, almost 5 years ago

      Hi Jernej,

      When you publish a Design Specs link and access it on the web, you will land in a page that we internally refer to as "UX Flows Page". You can hover over the artbaords one by one to see the flow you had prototyped in XD. Is this what you are looking for?

      1 point
      • Jernej Horvat, almost 5 years ago

        The flows in the Adobe XD Design Specs indicate connections between artboards (that's how I see it in the Design Specs). What I'm looking for is the ability to visualize the flow based on connecting the artboards with particular UI elements.

        For example, you have three buttons on the main screen. Each button takes you to a different screen. It would be useful to see the connection lines going from each button to the appropriate screen instead of just showing connections between the artboards. Similar to what you see in the prototyping mode of XD just with the ability to have the connections displayed without the need to select an artboard + an option to export the flows in a PDF or similar.

        2 points
  • Brian A.Brian A., almost 5 years ago

    Hey Mike! Thanks for posting. Do you have any plans to integrate XD with InVision (or any other existing web prototyping software), or is XD intended to be a standalone solution?

    2 points
  • Account deleted almost 5 years ago

    When will adobe XD have the functionality of fireworks, and will it be discontinued, like fireworks was?

    1 point
  • Jacob JJacob J, almost 5 years ago

    I'm working on an app design and new screens for it. I have a co-worker also working in a duplicate file, but we have to check-in with eachother to copy/paste new artboards and then re link in the prototype mode. Are there any tools coming to allow for better collaboration?

    1 point
  • Christopher Alan, almost 5 years ago

    Hi there! When it comes to design specs I had a few questions (sorry I probably could also google this) but...

    • Is there a way to download an asset say an icon or an image? In my brief test I couldn't get it working.

    • Is there a way to password protect a private (or public) link instead of inviting users via email? I work with a lot of different offshore teams and never actually know who needs an invite.

    Thanks!

    1 point
    • Manish Agrahari, almost 5 years ago

      Hi Christopher, here are the answers to your queries -

      1. Not really as of now, but yes team is working on providing this functionality soon.

      2. Yes, with XD we have three ways to share links-

        • public sharing without password protection
        • public sharing with password protection
        • private sharing (invite via e-mail)

      for your use case, you may use public sharing with password protection, while creating link just check on "require password" check box and provide a password. Once link is created, you need to share this password with stakeholders separately, they would need this password to open the shared link.

      1 point
  • Simon Deighton, almost 5 years ago

    This is only a small thing, but when you've got layout column guides enabled (and visible) and you try to colour drop something behind it you get the mixed colour of the element AND the guides colour if that makes sense.

    Why would you ever want to colour drop the layout column colour? :D

    0 points