By Dani Beaumont
With the latest release of XD we've made it even easier for you to work with Adobe Illustrator content.
When you open Illustrator files and XD, your design converts over while retaining edibility and visual fidelity. To test out this concept I went to the Adobe Stock Portfolio and searched for examples of icon sets in the native Illustrator format. I found one that looked good, and I downloaded it to my own computer.
I now have a few ways that I can convert this content to an XD file. I can select Open in XD and browse for the file. I can also drag the Illustrator file icon over my XD application on a Macintosh, or I can just right-click here in the Fifinder and select "Open with Adobe XD". The first thing you'll notice is how quickly the file converted from native Illustrator format to XD. From here I could start to drill down on the content. Now the beauty about this conversion is that all of the artwork, layers, artboards and groups carry over nicely. If I come over to the content and just hover over it, you'll notice that it's saved out a group of icons. If I select that group set and right-click to ungroup them, they become individual icons and what you'll notice is if I click on the Layers icon, here in the lower left-hand corner of the application, I've got a single artboard. And if I click on an individual icon, I can see that the group name carried over. This one's called "Wi-Fi".
Now, I mentioned that we retain visual fidelity and editability. That means that I can come into any of these individual items and as I drill down on the layer content notice that I can select individual vector content and actually come in and change fill colors, change the actual vectors that were originally designed in illustrator. When I save the document out, It'll be in the native XD file format going forward.
I encourage you to give this new workflow a try.
Easily open up Adobe Illustrator files in Adobe XD to bring flat designs to life with micro-interactions and rich prototyping. When Illustrator files are opened in Adobe XD, all the vector paths and objects are retained, keeping them as editable elements so you can speed up your workflow, and go from design to prototype at the speed of thought.
