By Dani Beaumont
If you're a fan of moving sketch content into Adobe XD, your world just got an awful lot better. Not only are symbols and sketch converted to XD components, but you now have the choice of onboarding them into XD as linked assets.
I'm here in Sketch and I have the Hoffman UI kit open. It's a nice kit that has style guides for fonts and colours, there are templates for specific layouts, there's also a page of symbols and then symbols that are laid out for multiple artboards.
I can always convert this sketch file to a native XD document but I really want to take advantage of the linked assets feature and use the Hoffman UI kit as a source for my design system. For this, we have a terrific new streamlined workflow.
I'll begin by switching back over to XD and here within the XD application I have a working document that I'd like to use those Hoffman UI elements for. To do that, I'm going to come here to the assets panel and I'm going to click the link to assets button. This dialogue in addition to cloud documents in those that have been shared with me, I can now convert a sketch library.
When I click that link, I then can navigate to where I have the sketch file, I'll go ahead and click it and then click select. XD at this point is going to convert the source sketch content, I can see the conversion here in the lower left-hand corner of the application. It's going to automatically save that Hoffman UI kit as a cloud document and then link all of of the colours, character styles and components in that cloud document to my working design here.
So notice if I scroll up I've got some character styles that are linked as well as individual components here. Now as I work I can start to interact with these components. I'll just come in and drag a few of them onto the design canvas. I'll go ahead and duplicate it onto a second artboard as I'm working.
Because this is a design system and, these are linked assets, I can come in and edit the source in the cloud document that was created. To do that, I'll come on in and click an instance of this component. And in the right menu, I'll select edit master in source document. XD is going to go ahead and open up the cloud version of that XD document. From here, I can come on in to that individual item and make some edits. Once those changes are all set, I'll just switch back over to my working document.
Because, it's a cloud source document, it will automatically save into the cloud. I can see it a glance that there have been changes to one of the components that I'm working with.
If I roll over this change link icon, I can see the changes that I've made and go ahead and accept them when I'm done.
If I have multiple sketch libraries that I'd like to work with, I can always come back to the assets panel and click the plus button in the right hand corner and once again convert another sketch library.
If I've done working with this particular UI kit, I can come to the drop-down menu here and roll over that Hoffman UI kit and just check the close button to close out that library.
The cloud version of the Hoffman UI kit is going to remain in the cloud for future use or I can go in and delete that if I no longer need it.
When you couple this with some of the other sketch import improvements like non-destructive blend modes, text position accuracy and page and symbol separation, there's a whole lot of value to this sketch to XD workflow. I encourage you to give it a try.
If you want to move your design created in Sketch to Adobe XD, then there is excellent news. Learn how to import Sketch library files into an Adobe XD document and how to link assets and components to other Adobe XD documents. Save time working across products by creating designs in Sketch and then importing the assets into your XD projects. When Sketch files are imported, they are automatically converted into XD's format and are fully editable. Sketch pages are imported with named sections for each page, making it easy to see and access all of your content.
