When you're working on a complex design, keeping your content organized can be one of the biggest challenges. Adobe XD allows you to design literally thousands of artboards at the speed of thought, but if you can't easily locate the content on those artboards, your productivity can really suffer. XD now supports a number of organizational features in the Assets panel of the application. Let me show you around some of these new capabilities here in Adobe XD.
I'd like to begin to organize my assets, so the first thing I'll do is open up the Assets panel. I can do that by clicking on the lower left hand corner, which brings that panel up. If you're already familiar with the Assets panel, you'll notice that we've added a second view. We now have a list view in addition to the grid view. I can always toggle back to that grid view here, but I'm gonna stay on the list view because that allows me to organize my content in a more robust way. Now you'll notice that I have a number of symbols that have been defined here on the left. Some of them have given friendly names so I've actually identified icons here. But towards the top it's using the default naming that XD applies every time you add a new symbol.
I want to bring over colors and character styles from my design, so to do that I'm going to come in and first I'll select all of the artboards on the design canvas. And then in the Assets panel, I'll click on the plus sign to the right of the color attributes. I want to do the same with character styles but I just want to select from a single artboard to do that. I'll click on the samurai artboard and then I'll click on the character styles.
Now that I've added all of these items into the Assets panel, I want to apply friendly names to make it easier for me to search and recognize each of the items as I work with them. I'll begin with colors and I just want to come here and double-click on that color value, rather than identifying it with a text value I'm gonna assign friendly names to each of the colors. I can tab to move to the next item in the list. Now that the colors are in good shape, let's do the same with our character styles. With that all set, I can focus on symbols. Now keep in mind any of the names that I apply to the symbols here in the Assets panel will also apply to every instance of that symbol in the Layers panel.
Well now that I have the naming all set, I can start to work with the filter and sort features that we've added to the Assets panel. Here towards the top, you'll remember that we have the list view and the grid view. As I roll over each of my asset types, I'm going to get different tooltip information based on that view. Notice that in the list view, I can see the name that I've assigned to this color and when I roll over the tooltip still retains that hex value. If I switch over to the grid view and roll over that same color, I can no longer see the name in the grid view. So the tooltip includes the name and the hex value you'll want to check out those tooltip values for character styles and symbols as well.
Back up towards the top, you'll notice that I have a search field with a drop-down menu. Clicking on that drop-down menu allows me to filter between colors, character styles, and symbols, or all of my assets. Alternatively, I can come in and type in part of the name, so if I type in ICO it'll bring up all of the symbols that I've labeled with the ICO or icon name. I could type in real -- which is the name of my client -- where I've gone in and tagged my clients colors, their particular typeface that I use with them, and a symbol that has their logo. Obviously there's lots of new functionality here in the Assets panel. I encourage you to give these new features a try.