We live in the best of times, we live in the worst of times. I hope Mr. Dickens can forgive me for misquoting him for personal gain and using his wisdom in a piece of no literary value whatsoever. But If he was a designer in 2018, I’m sure he would understand…
Ever since the first caveman used a lump of coal to create the first #000000 pixel in the history of this planet, humans have never had more ways and more tools at their disposal to express their creativity. On the one hand, it’s brilliant to have this freedom of choice and to be able to decide for ourselves what we want to use in our day to day battles.
On the other coal grasping hand, though, the number of tools available to us nowadays grows bigger every day, causing a constant fragmentation of design tools into many different groups, not necessarily compatible with each other.
Sometimes it feels like a new graphic design software is being announced every week, each one of them claiming to be THE SHI… uh, I mean the app we’ve been waiting for and promising to make our working lives easier and more streamlined. Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Affinity Designer, Figma, Framer, Invision Studio, Adobe Xd and a new one that was announced while I was typing this sentence, they all seem to want to do the same thing and fight for their place under the sun.
If you are a new designer, making your first steps in this line of work, you could be forgiven for losing track of it all and not knowing what tools to focus on while building your portfolio. Should you go with Sketch and risk potential collaboration problems with the huge Windows-based community, should you be the adventurous commando jumping into the smaller user pool with Affinity, Figma or Framer, or should you stick to the old dogs and their new tricks by choosing Adobe Xd?
Since the best decisions are always the informed ones, I have recently started working on a relatively big project using only Adobe Xd, not only because I wanted to figure out if it’s ready for the big league, but also because I like to complicate my life more than it’s necessary.
And here’s what I found out…
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can’t deny that Adobe has been working hard trying to make Xd everything that designers wanted ever since Sketch decided to rumble in and shake things up.
Conference after conference Adobe has been showcasing their new toy and its features, adding new ones and fixing the bugs on a weekly basis, trying to keep up with the pace of tools that said “you don’t need a thousand options and branching dropdowns to be a graphic design tool”.
There’s absolutely no doubt Adobe Xd is a tool put together as a reaction to the skyrocketing popularity of apps that dared to invade Adobe’s comfort spot and say “we can do things better and more efficiently”. And you know what? It shows.
Following the footsteps of game studios offering early access to their unfinished games, Adobe has drafted the design community to beta test their product and while this system does have its advantages, I’m not a huge fan of such practice because it’s often abused.
Essentially, you’re invited to use Xd as your primary design and prototyping tool, but when you find it’s lacking some of the basic features, you’re supposed to get over it because, you know, they’re still working on it.
I really don’t mean to sound like I’m hating on the product, because it is by far the freshest thing Adobe has put out in years. It’s not easy to rethink everything you’ve worked hard at for decades. It’s not easy switching from icons hidden behind more icons and endless branching menus to a completely clean interface with eight basic options and no clutter whatsoever.
Adobe has gone a long way to simplify the Xd interface, but after working on it for a few weeks, I can’t help but think they have oversimplified things to the point it makes you want to go back to whatever app you were using before.
Take, for instance, an action probably as old as the design apps itself — flipping an object horizontally or vertically. You would think it’s one of the first options you implement into your design app, but it’s still not possible to flip or mirror anything in Xd, which has already caused a few problems for me while working on this project. What the flip, Adobe?
You want to set different line heights in a single paragraph independent of each other? Well, you can’t. Only one line height per paragraph to rule them all. You want to set font size or kerning or any kind of value by picking the size from a dropdown? Nope. Each value has to be typed in. Every. Single. Time.
Colors can be saved as presets but gradients for some reason can’t, unless you add them to assets. And while I can live without some fancy new version of layer styles, it’s difficult to comprehend how an object can cast drop shadow, but it’s unable to cast inner shadow. If you are in need of inner shadows, here’s what you need to do: draw a rectangle path, apply blur to it, draw another rectangle and mask the first one with the second one. Simple, right?
And let’s not forget the day when Xd decided to automatically open the exact same file on every startup, for no apparent reason. The bug, as it turned out, has been reported to Adobe numerous times, with the development team replying “we’re working on a fix for you guys”. That was in August 2017. If I was keeping my fingers crossed, I’d have serious knuckle damage by now.
I don’t know about you, but for a tool that’s advertised as a solution to problems, to me Adobe Xd in its current state seems to create quite a few new ones. Even the compatibility with other Adobe apps is very, very limited. You can copy a path from Illustrator to Xd but copying the same path back to Illustrator creates a rasterized mess.
In conclusion — it’s clear that Adobe Xd means well and its intents are ultimately heading in the right direction. But is it ready to be the standalone tool for UX/UI design? In my opinion, not yet, not by a long shot. Considering how far Sketch has gone since it was first launched in 2010, there’s a long, winding road in front of Adobe Xd.
So where does that leave us?
It’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves at the agency for some time now and all I can say is that the jury is still out on that one. While we are still mostly Adobe fans and will most certainly keep our eyes on Xd, our hopes and dreams at the moment lie with Invision Studio, which seems to promise great things and, as opposed to Sketch or Framer, offers cross-platform compatibility and awesome, advanced prototyping tools.
Alas, our invitations for Invision Studio seem to have taken a detour and are taking their time. Even though we’ve hired a professional refresh button operator to keep checking our e-mail and let us know as soon as they arrive, there’s been no sign of them yet. When that finally happens, we’ll let you know if it was worth the wait.
In the meantime, keep on living in the best of times and the worst of times…
Marin Vukovic is a senior UX/UI designer at Euroart93, a peculiar creature feeding on sarcasm and ironies of everyday life. Cat connoisseur, animal rights warrior, Manchester United fan and sports geek whose life passions include bicycle rides, gaming, left-clicking, parachuting behind enemy lines and expecting things to go wrong. You can find him on Dribbble (https://dribbble.com/marinvukovic), but why would you want to do that?
