By Howard Pinsky
Whether you’re working alone or with a team of designers, building out a cohesive design system can greatly improve workflows, and linked assets within Adobe XD helps you keep it all up to date. Let’s take a look.
Here’s a document that may be used as a design system to make sure you or your team are in control of necessary colors, character styles, and components. To ensure everything stays in sync, especially across large groups of designers, your master file should be saved as a cloud document – then if you’re working with others who will need access, you can share it with them directly so they can pull in everything they need to keep their projects in line with your defined style.
Now, if you’re starting a project from scratch, hop into your assets panel and you’ll see a big blue button to link assets, or if you’re working off an existing document, you’ll press the plus button at the top. Now you can browse for documents that either you have created, or that have been shared with you – and when one is selected, all assets from the source document will flow on in, and any imported asset will be marked with a link icon. You also have the ability to filter to show not only a specific type of asset, but also assets that were created locally in this document or any that have been linked from other files.
You can now start using the colors, character styles, and components that have come over from the source document, and if you’re working on different sized screens, your linked components will resize beautifully.
But the beauty of working with a design system, is the ability to update a single master file and have the changes push to everyone who may be pulling from it.
Since I control the master file for this system, I’m able to right-click on any linked asset and choose Edit in Source Document. I can now go through and make a few changes to the various assets that my designers are using throughout their projects. This is often necessary if company colors or fonts change, or the overall style of elements evolve. In this particular case, we may be moving away from rounded corners for some of our buttons, the highlight color needs tweaking, and the title font will be switched to something that’s…not Papyrus.
Once the document is saved, anyone who has those assets loaded in will see their link icons change to blue, letting them know that an update is available, and hovering over any of them will preview the update before it’s accepted – and when the changes are pushed, they not only update in the assets panel, but across the entire document, as well.
And that’s your look at how linked assets in Adobe XD can help you and your team work seamlessly – keeping colors, character styles, and components up to date. To continue your XD journey head on over to LetsXD.com and subscribe to the Creative Cloud YouTube channel to catch the latest product updates and live streams.
Building out a cohesive design system or component library can greatly improve workflows. Linked assets within Adobe XD help you keep your elements all up to date. Building a design system or component library in Adobe XD makes it easy to reuse components and assets across design files by linking assets from a source document to any working file. Linked assets in Adobe XD remain synced to the original design system or component library, so when changes are made, the linked assets can be updated in a single click, improving the workflow for keeping elements up to date. Learn more about linked assets, and building design systems in Adobe XD.
