By Dani Beaumont
Stacks in Adobe XD enable objects within a group to have defined, fixed spaces between them. Resizing or reordering an object within a stack moves the other objects out of the way while it preserves any of that predefined space. Let me show you what I mean.
I'm in the middle of laying out a few artboards here in Adobe XD, and I'd like to work with the stacks feature. I'm going to begin by opening up the Layers panel. So for that I'll come here to the lower left-hand corner, open up that panel, and I'll click one of the objects on this first artboard.
I can see the structure of my artboard here on the left-hand side. The rule with stacks is whenever you want to be able to organize something as a stack you need to group it together. So I'm going to come and select all of the objects on this first design canvas, and in the right menu, I'll define them as a group. I'll come here into the Layers panel and I'll go ahead and give it a friendly name, and I'll expand it out.
With that group now selected, I'm going to come here into the Properties Inspector, and in the Layout section below Responsive Resize, notice dI have the ability to define it as a stack. If I check that box XD is going to examine the content that I have selected and make a guess as to whether or not it should be a vertical stack or a horizontal stack. It's already guessed correctly, so I'll let that be.
I'm going to come in now to the header section here, and I'll double-click on it. We'll give that a friendly name, we'll call it header. And then with that still selected, I'll come back to the Properties Inspector. and again define this as a vertical stack. At this point XD, when it converts the objects into that stack, also determines what type of padding might be around the objects as they sit on top of the background or the back-most layer for the group.
So in this header area I have this green rectangle with Plant and the subhead sitting on top of it. And notice when I select it, I can see that the padding was automatically defined, and that it's different reflecting the space between each of these areas on the side. When I'm ready to start interacting with the objects, I can just come on in and select one of them, and just press and drag to move it in the stack or in that hierarchical structure.
If I decide I want to change the spacing around it I can move the cursor up until I see a pink highlight letting me know what the current spacing value is. I could come here towards the top and by pressing and dragging from the bottom reduce the overall space. Notice that all the content below moves up as well. From there, I could come in and create a little bit more space now between that top area and the word "Plant". So just by pressing and dragging, I could affect that change.
If for some reason I wanted all of the spacing to be the same, I can hold down the shift key and the "s" key on the keyboard and as I press and drag it's going to rather dramatically change all of that spacing to be the same as you can see here. I'll go ahead and click off and undo that change. I kind of like the spacing that I defined there.
Let's look at a second example on this second artboard. I'm going to go ahead and move so that I can see it a bit more clearly. Now snacks can be nested within one another, and each stack can have either horizontal or vertical for its stack direction. Let's take a look at this second example to see how I might integrate the two together. What I want to do first is come in and select each of these little pods and group them together. I'm using a keyboard shortcut to do that and changing them to separate groups.
Now that I've set them all to be separate groups, I can come in and select all of the groups at once, so shift-select here in the Layers panel. And then over in the Properties Inspector, as you might expect, under the stacks area, I'm going to go ahead and turn on Stacks. Notice that XD realizes that the content is moving more towards the left in the right. It's a horizontal stack, and it's accommodating that.
From here what I'm now able to do is come in and just start to arrange the content within that stacked group. So I might decide that I want to move the image here on every other tile. Over towards the right rather than having it there on the left. So I have that defined for each of those groups.
What I can do now is create another stack on the vertical to organize my content from top to bottom on this artboard. For that, I'll come in and — let's just select this center content here. So I selected it all. Once again, I'm going to group it and I'll give this — we'll call this "center content" — and hit return. With that set and selected, I'll now come over into the Properties Inspector, and I'm going to enable the stack feature on the vertical.
So what I can do is now come in at that higher level and maybe rearrange the items. I might decide that Peace Lily here should actually move down and Rubber Plant should move up. Now I'm making these changes or moves by tunneling into the hierarchical structure and using ESC to tunnel back out again. Once I have Rubber Plant selected, I can press and drag that back up to the higher area. And if I don't like the spacing, let's say the spacing seems a little inconsistent for me. I'll hold shift and CMD on the Mac or shift and CTRL on Windows and make sure that all of that space is uniform between each of the tiles.
One thing you do want to keep in mind — stacks are a design-time feature. So although you're seeing movement as I move content up and down within the stack, this is not going to translate to my prototype for example For that I'm going to need to simulate a drag behavior or a move behavior the way I have in the past using something like auto-animate to transition between states or artboards. The last thing I want to mention is stacks, coupled with padding and responsive resize, start to make a powerful feature combination when you're working in a design system. When stacks are used on a main component, any instance of that component is going to respect that stacking structure. This means I can simply grab a component for my design system, make any changes that I need to, and not have to resize or move layers around to accommodate that change.
This is obviously just a brief overview of the stack feature, I encourage you to give it a try.
Keep spacing consistent between objects as your designs changes. Stacks make it easy to insert and reorder items without adding tedious manual work. As you insert new objects into a layout, Stacks adjust the spacing automatically to keep everything lined up.
