By Dani Beaumont
Libraries in Adobe XD empower you to build, manage and distribute design and brand systems — all directly within the XD application. I'm working on a brand kit here in the app that I want to share out with my team. When I come and open up the Libraries panel by clicking the icon here in the lower left-hand corner of the application, you can see I've come in and created a number of colours, character styles and components that I want to be part of this library. Because I can place each of the components and colours directly on the design canvas, it makes it really easy for me, as a designer, to build out a complete system of elements that look really good in relationship to one another.
When I'm ready to publish the design system, all I need to do is come here to the upper-right-hand corner of the application and click the Publish button. In the library's manager, XD tells me the current file name. This is what I'm going to publish up as a library. Below that, I can see any library I might have created in the past or that might have been created by someone else and then shared with me. I can always toggle them on or off based on the project I'm about to work on and what I might need access to. To go ahead and push this out as a library onto its own, I'll come here on the right-hand side and click the Publish button. XD informs me that it's going to create a cloud document. I'll go ahead and click Continue. And from here, I can give a new name to this cloud document and library, maybe something that's more intuitive for my team. I'll go ahead and leave it with the default for now and click the Save button. And XD is going to begin uploading that content and extracting it to a library.
Now, when this publishing is complete, I can come in and start to select who it is I want to share the content with. For that, I'll just come in and type in their Adobe ID. I can give them a friendly note to let them know what it's in reference to. I also have the ability to decide whether or not the people that I share this library with can simply view or consume the library or actually edit and make changes to the source. If, moving forward, I make any changes to this cloud library by updating colours, character styles or components or adding any new content, I can come in and republish or update that library and the consumers will be notified that the changes have been made. And they can then choose whether or not they want to apply the changes to any of their active working documents or just move forward with the design they might already have in place.
Well, that's just a quick look at how easy it is to share design systems using Creative Cloud Libraries in Adobe XD. I encourage you to give this a try.
Design a brand kit that contains colours, character styles and components to share with your team. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to use Creative Cloud Libraries to build, manage and distribute design and brand systems directly in Adobe XD. The Libraries panel displays libraries that you’ve created and any libraries that've been shared with you. Creative Cloud Libraries are helpful when you’re building out a complete system of elements that complement each another because you can style components and colours directly on the design canvas, in context with all the other graphics in your project.
