The New Adobe XD Ecosystem: Supercharging Design Workflows with Third-Party Plugins
To everyone in the design community calling out for plugins since the launch of Adobe XD — we’ve been listening to you. Soon, with XD APIs, developers will be able to build new features, automate workflows, and connect XD to the tools and services designers use every day.
The demands on designers’ and developers’ time seem to increase every day. You’re pushed to do more, and you need to do it faster and more efficiently than ever before. You likely depend on dozens of tools to get your team’s ideas from design to production, which often creates friction and takes a lot of time. As powerful and performant as XD is for designing and prototyping, we know it doesn’t have every feature that experience designers need, and we know it doesn’t connect with every other service in the design workflow. That’s why we’ve been working hard to create the XD developer platform and ecosystem, democratizing feature development and finding the best individuals and companies to build integrations that extend XD, unlock workflows, add useful functionality, and make XD the perfect all-in-one tool for experience designers.
Whether you want to build the ability to design with real data or check designs against accessibility standards, or you want to automate repetitive tasks like renaming artboards, or you want to connect XD to your collaboration or project management service, or you want to explore any one of the near-infinite possibilities, you’ll soon have an open platform and a robust API surface to work with.
The XD extensibility APIs and initial set of plugins will be available later this year, but we’re excited to announce some of the first companies and products we’ve been working with: Microsoft, Google Cloud, Trello, UserTesting, Airtable, Dribbble, Silicon Publishing, Slope, inMotionNow, Astute Graphics, Anima, our own Behance and Stock services, and many more.
Adobe Fund for Design first recipients will empower UX designers
Additionally, in May we announced the Adobe Fund for Design, $10 million to support innovative people and emerging companies that are building tools and services to empower designers around the world. Today, we’re also thrilled to announce the first recipients of this fund:
- CloudApp — Video, webcam, screenshot annotation and GIF creation securely in the cloud.
- Protoio Inc, makers of Overflow — Empowers designers to design, present, and share beautiful user flow diagrams that tell a story.
- Stark — Helps you design and build products that are accessible, ethical, and inclusive.
- Florian Schulz, Maker of Ratio — Maker of design tools for user interface typographers.
- Precious Design Studio — A studio that helps innovators shape meaningful products and services that people love to interact with, as well as design tools such as Data Populator and Open Color Tools.
- Odin Chart — Tyler Wolf is a data visualization designer building Odin Chart, a designer-friendly tool that makes creating charts for digital products and publications a breeze.
- Iconscout by Chamestudio — High-quality Icons, illustrations, and stock photos in one place.
- Impekable — Digital agency specializing in user experience design and enterprise software engineering.
- UI Faces — Avatars for design mockups.
- Prototypr.io — The community platform for designers to share their work and stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest design tools and news.
- Modulz — A visual code editor for designing and building digital user interfaces — without writing code.
- Design+Code — The team behind popular design and code courses and the Angle plugin.
- Yummygum — Creates tasty looking designs and refreshing experiences for web and mobile.
The Adobe Fund for Design is distributed in the form of grants and equity investments and provides support to designers, developers, and entrepreneurs innovating in the world of experience design and integrating with Creative Cloud. The conviction these teams and individuals share is inspiring and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them to shape the future of design and creativity. If you’d like join us on this journey, you can apply for the fund here.
By opening the Adobe XD platform, we’ll supercharge design workflows by enabling users to customize their tools with an ecosystem of community and partner-built plugins. This brings us closer to our goal of creating a full end-to-end UX/UI design experience with XD, empowering our customers with game-changing products and Creative Cloud-powered experiences wherever and however they work — and empowering developers to build those experiences.
Want to learn more about XD plugin APIs? Go here to sign up for notifications about the launch.
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