Adobe XD is one of the most commonly used design platforms for UI/UX design and prototyping. You can create, iterate and animate your designs and share them with others.
I’m Elsa, an Adobe XD Ambassador and in this article, I’ll be sharing a few key features from my daily planner in Adobe XD. Feel free to download the template here.
If you are new to XD, be sure to check out the 7-day trial for their Single App Plan. It offers commitment-free, unlimited access to all XD features, like content-aware layouts, repeat grids and 3D transforms.
Avoiding manual inputs with components
As someone who struggles with periodic bouts of laziness, I wanted to simplify inputting information as much as possible. Fortunately, Adobe XD components make this process much easier.
Components are reusable groupings of elements (shapes, texts, images, etc), or they can be individual elements. Every component has two parts to it: a “Main Component” that is the parent and “instances” that are the children versions.
Using components, I created multiple instances to represent the different months in a year. By selecting the component, I can choose which month I’d like to show by scrolling through the different instances on the right. Now, I no longer have to write out the month each time!
Custom statuses with padding
I wanted my daily planner to also feel more personable. So what about including custom statuses? Just a tiny part in my day sections where I can briefly describe how I felt at the end or start of my day. By using padding, it was really easy to create a custom shape that would automatically resize itself according to what I wrote.
Enabling padding with grouped elements helps to define spacing between the contents of the group and the background layer. The background layer will automatically readjust to maintain the padding constraints you specify. This shortcut saves you time from having to manually readjust elements as you add more information!
Now regardless of whether I’m feeling “happy” or “exhausted”, I don’t have to worry about manually resizing and moving around elements. Padding will do that for me! If I ever want to readjust the spacing between elements, I can also do that easily through the padding menu.
Components for customizing your notes
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always my planners as a place to write my notes and any reminders or tasks to be completed. However, having to manually create these different notes each time and duplicate them can get tiring. So once again, we have components to the rescue!
Using components you can create your own unique note types that you can swap through as you write. In my case, I have my default bullet point, an incomplete task and a complete task so that I can check off things as I go. This means it’s really easy for me to select the component instance I need at any given moment.
Minimising how much space is used with tabs
Probably one of my favourite features that I incorporated into my planner. Tabs!! Sometimes there’s extra content I don’t necessarily want to include in my days, but that I still want space for. In this case, I wanted a section for miscellaneous notes, goals and even an emoji library. I used components (once again) to create tabs for each of those sections.
As you switch through the different instances, a new tab is opened up with its respective content. That’s the beauty of components. You can customize each instance as much as you want, making it a lot easier to showcase a variety of content without using too much space.
In summary
Adobe XD comes with various features that can help you create advanced templates for your planners! If you have any questions regarding the article or the template I have provided, feel free to ask!
