By Dani Beaumont
When you're building out a complex design system with lots of colors, character styles, and components, organizing all that content can become really tedious. Path view in the Layers and Assets panel of Adobe XD can really help speed up this work.
Let's begin here in Design mode with the Layers panel open. Here on the design canvas I have a set of objects I'd like to convert to a component. To do so, I'll go ahead and select the objects. Then in the right menu I'll select Make Component. When I assign a name to this component, I can also define the subgroup structure I'd like it to be added to in the Assets panel. In this case, I'll go with layouts / sliders / price... with the forward slash indicating a subgroup. Now, if down the line, I decide to change the name of this component here in the Layers panel, that change is automatically going to apply in the Assets panel.
When I press Enter on the keyboard, then switch over in the Assets panel, I can see here in the Components area, a layout subgroup. Within that, a sliders subgroup. And inside of that, the price component I've just created. Now the Assets panel has a few toggles here towards the upper right-hand corner of the panel. I'm currently in List view. And when I click on the toggle icon, here on the right, I'll switch to Grid view. And my components below will switch to more of a thumbnail preview. To the left of the list toggle is a path versus tree toggle. By default, I'm in tree view which displays my subgroup hierarchy using indentations. Now, this will work well visually but as you might guess, if I end up with a lot more subgroups, it can get hard to see the hierarchy as the content's going to continue to indent here towards the right. If I come back up and toggle from tree view to path view, the list is going to remain the same overall, but notice now that the forward slash indicates the hierarchy without having to indent it towards the right.
One really nice feature about path view is that it allows me to walk the hierarchy within the component area. Let's say, I want to move these button icons to a new location. When I double-click on the subgroup name and delete the word button, XD shows me in a drop-down, all of the subgroups at this level of the hierarchy. I don't need to scan the list or remember the names I've used. They're all just listed for me here. I'll go ahead and move this under the product subgroup. I can still freely drag objects to reorder them within a subgroup or to another subgroup. If things get really complicated, I can come in and select a few components. Then in the right menu, select Move Selected Items To. From this dialog, I can navigate to a new location or create a new subgroup directly here. Any subgroups I define in the Assets panel are going to carry over to my Creative Cloud Library when I publish it. All of those subgroups will be visible to any of my colleagues when they load the library on their own machine.
Oh, and one last advantage. The path view behavior will also apply when I open and convert a Sketch file to the native XD file format. As I've mentioned, this is an example of a simple design system, but I think you can see how much help these power features can be, when things start to get complex. I encourage you to give these capabilities a try.
Manage colors, character styles, and components in design systems using the path view in the Layers and Assets panels. Name design elements with forward slashes to put them into subgroups. The forward slashes define the hierarchy of your subgroups. You can drag items to reorder them within a subgroup or to another subgroup. Or choose Move Selected Items To, then select an existing subgroup or create a new subgroup.
