Last year, Adobe released a brief introduction and video of Adobe Project Comet on the website, and it is now available for download in the Preview version to try out. In the current version, the software is renamed Xd (also in the.xd file format) and is available at……

Currently, XD is only available for Mac, but the official website has confirmed that a Windows version is coming soon, so don’t worry. To put it simply, XD is vectorized graphic design + simple prototyping, similar to Sketch+Silver. Since I have applied for Silver but have not had the opportunity to try it out, it is not easy to compare the two, so I will simply give you an overview of XD.

First, open the home page of the software:

You can see that the supported devices and sizes are relatively rich, but also come with some commonly used UI Kits, such as iOS, Google Material, etc. This is very convenient for designers to quickly build pages from the library.

The interface is very clean, and if you’re familiar with Sketch, you don’t need any extra learning to get started.

This is the main panel of XD. On the left side are selected, inserted vector shapes, pens, text, and Artboard. On the right, it’s even easier to select different types of elements and edit them, such as shadows, colors, alignments, Booleans, and tables. Vector elements can be easily added, deleted, edited anchor points, with pen to create any graphics you want.

A magic feature called Repeat Grid has the effect of creating a Gird quickly and intuitively by dragging. It sounds like it’s no different from similar features in Sketch or PHOTOSHOP, but when you try it out, XD is much more intuitive and easy to interact with.

When the mouse holds down a certain distance, the value is displayed directly. And if you drag the spacing, you can make the entire Grid spacing change, using only the mouse and no additional keyboard shortcuts.

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It’s also easy to add and replace images, just drop PNGS into place, and XD will help you automatically match. Of course, if not satisfied with their own adjustment.

In fact, the design part of these functions is enough, we can dig a deeper operation. Here’s the Prototype feature.

You can quickly switch between Design and Prototype in the upper left corner of the screen. Under the Prototype interface, select the element and a small arrow appears to the right, and you can select simple animation types and parameters:

Unfortunately, currently XD can only do page switching, that is, let another page slide in a different direction to switch the original page, at most can only do fade in and out, want to fly out of an element alone should not be able to do so. But I don’t think Adobe is going to settle for anything more than page switching now that the prototype feature is in place.

The software comes with a preview function that allows you to view the effect directly on the Mac, and of course, you can simply interact with it by clicking on it. The software can directly achieve recording, but it seems that the size resolution can not be adjusted, currently can only export mov format video. In addition, I haven’t seen the preview of the corresponding App on the mobile phone for the time being, but I can generate a link through the share function and send it to others for viewing on the mobile phone. What is more depressing is that I do not know whether there is something wrong with the way I open the link has not been opened successfully.


All in all, THE interface design of XD software is deep in my heart. Adobe has the basis of PS and AI. I believe that there will be no problem in the visual design part, but the current interaction part is still immature. However, this is just the Preview release, and Abobe will improve it in subsequent iterations.

Click on the original text to view XD official website, with video and other introduction, much more intuitive than text.