By Howard Pinsky
As XD continues to evolve more features are being brought to the table that offer designers unique experiences to take their projects to new levels, whether you want to take advantage of fully overrideable components, repeat grids, or robust prototyping including auto-animate, voice, and gamepad support. Let's take a look at how you can import your Sketch files into Adobe XD.
Here we have a pretty in-depth file that was designed using Sketch which include several artboards, a ton of elements, and quite a few symbols. And opening it up in XD is as simple as opening up an XD file. You can either drag it onto the application icon, or browse for it using the open dialog. Once imported you'll notice that everything transferred over beautifully and all the symbols have been converted into components instances which will be spread amongst your designs. You can find the masters in your assets panel and at the bottom of your canvas, you may also come across some colors in this area since they're often saved as symbols within Sketch. If you'd like to include them as part of your assets, simply select them all and press the + button beside colors. Now since components are stored within your assets panel you can either choose to leave the masters on your canvas or delete them to clean things up a touch. And if you ever need to edit one you're able to right-click either on an instance on the canvas, or within the Assets panel and choose "Edit Master Component".
So now that your Sketch file is loaded in, you can immediately continue designing with many of the features that make XD shine. Panning over to one of the artboards, I may want to create a grid using this first card. So making sure that it's selected. I'll hit the Repeat Grid button over to the right, drag out a few more down the screen, and then adjust the padding by pulling on the pink area with those in place. I'll hop over to Finder where I have a few images in a plain text file. All the images can be dragged onto any of the rectangles to populate the rest of the grid. Then the text file can be used to fill in the titles with our artboards. Looking great.
It's time to bring a few of them to life and that's where Prototype mode comes into play. This will allow you to link up your screens with simple transitions. Beautiful. And for this first example, I may want this button to lead over to this screen once an element is selected. I can drag the blue handle to its destination artboard and then define the properties over to the right in this case.
I want to user to tap on the button. So that will be the trigger next. I'll go with transition for the action. Then I can select how I want the new artboard to appear. Slide left should look pretty nice. Finally the easing and duration can be set to further define the position. Ease in out with a duration of 0.4 seconds will look great.
Before we preview this let's wire up one more this time adding a bit of animation. I'll start by duplicating this artboard over to the right and then I'll begin rearranging the various elements to get them looking how they should look after the animation completes.
The nice thing about auto-animate is that you simply need to design your various states and XD will figure out the rest. With that said I can now drag out an additional wire over to this artboard. But instead of a simple transition, I want to choose auto-animate instead, and maybe for the easing I'll go with snap this time. Great.
Let's see this all in action. The play button at the top will launch the prototype where I can now interact with it to get a better feel of how it'll function once developed and with very little effort. We've also been able to introduce animation into our flow.
And that's a quick look at how you can import your Sketch files into Adobe XD, and just a glimpse of where you can take them from there.
Adobe XD supports the importing of Sketch files, making it simple to bring your Sketch designs into Adobe XD to expand on them with prototyping functionality. To import Sketch files, simply use the "Open with Adobe XD" option from your file browser, or on a Mac simply drag the Sketch file on top of the Adobe XD icon in the Dock to import.
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