Let’s understand the role of learning Adobe XD for a website developer or designer in this post.
We browse many websites normally daily. These websites help us to get the information and content. As users, we expect a good experience on websites while browsing them. If websites are unable to provide that expected experience, it results in a negative impact. This impact leads to potential loss of business.
There are many reasons for this impact, but the UI of that website can be the main reason. Thus, UI designing is a crucial aspect for web designers to prioritize, rather than focusing solely on the coding part.
In this blog, we will go through the role of learning Adobe XD for a website developer. Before that, let’s first quickly know what exactly Adobe XD is.
What is Adobe XD?
Adobe XD is a UI design software to create a user interface with high user experience. UI designers can share a link with the development team to work further. So, XD offers good collaboration features to the team.
Adobe XD is a master tool to help you design high-level UI for websites or mobile apps. XD offers designing, prototyping, and collaboration features to web designers and developers. So, XD becomes an important tool to explore.
To gain a better understanding of how Adobe XD works, let’s consider an example.
The UI of the e-commerce website shown above was created using Adobe XD software.
It offers a wide range of tools such as shapes, line tools, pen tools, and many more to design.
Let’s delve into the process of creating web UI in XD to better understand its role in overall web development.
Making Web UI: Role of Adobe XD for a Web Developer
The appropriate procedure for creating the UI shown above would be to first create its wireframe.
What are Wireframes?
Wireframes will show us how and where the components will be placed on the website.
How to make wireframes in Adobe XD?
Step 1. Make an Artboard
We will first create an artboard with the required width for designing the web UI. The width of the artboard will be as shown in the above image. XD supports multiple artboards. After creating the artboard, we will add and use grid lines for symmetric positioning of our components. If you are unsure about the grid layout, you can refer to the Bootstrap web UI guidelines.
Step 2. Decide sub parts
The next step is to determine the sizes of our header area, middle area, and various elements. After placing all the content in their respective sections, our wireframe will resemble something like this:
Wireframes are created in grayscale color generally, but you are free to put text and colors. This is helpful for developers as it clarifies the positioning of each element in the design. After completing the wireframes, we will proceed to the visual UI design.
After completing the wireframes, we will jump on visual UI.
How to make visual UI in Adobe XD?
Step 3. Add visual elements to wireframes
Once your wireframes are ready, you need to follow their structure and just add images, text, colors, borders, etc. of your choice. It will beautify the web page or you can say to make it visually appealing. XD also provides libraries where a user can save colors and character styles. These will be very useful for repeating styles and elements in the UI and will save us time.
Once the designing stage is completed, you have the next step to take. The next step is what saves a lot of time for web developers, and that is the prototype.
What is a prototype?
Prototyping is used to create interaction links between different artboards and components in Adobe XD.
How to use the prototyping features of Adobe XD?
Step 4. Start prototyping
After completing the design phase, we have another feature in Adobe XD known as “Prototype.
To understand the concept better, let’s take an example:
Here, we have taken 2 artboards naming home and contact us. Now, our goal is to create a link between both of them. When the user clicks on the Contact Us button on the homepage, he/she should be directed to contact page.
Step to proceed
For this, we will create a link between the Contact Us button and the contact page.
To link them, we will first go to prototype mode and click on the Contact Us button. After clicking, an arrow will appear on the button.
Now, we have to click on the arrow and drag its other end to the contact artboard.
This will complete our task. We can also define triggers, animation, and action types to make our designs more pleasant visually.
This also provides a much clearer picture to the developer before coding the same.
These all were the major features of Adobe XD.
Minor Features of Adobe XD
Talking about minors, we have still got plenty of them.
To manage the components better, we can group them into different categories. It helps to arrange the text, shapes, and images more systematically.
Another great feature we have in Adobe XD is Repeat Grid.
A repeat grid allows the user to create a group having multiple copies of the selected components. These components can be used in horizontal as well as vertical directions. This feature also helps in easily managing equal margins between each portion. We have to just set margin once between two components and the same is applied between other components by itself.
Export
Adobe XD allows us to export our artboards and components in JPG, PNG, and PDF formats. These are beneficial for us in sharing the file with users not have Adobe XD software installed with them.
Responsive resize
Discussing minor features, Responsive resize is also a very useful tool. Responsive resize is used when we want to create a similar artboard but of different sizes. When responsive resize in On, the size of components changes simultaneously as per the size of the artboard. This saves a lot of time for designers when they have to create UIs for different-sized devices.
Closing remarks
In the end, we can say that Adobe XD is a very essential tool for website developers. We can improve the look and feel of the web page for a better user experience. Designers can manage text, images, headers, footers, borders, margins, component interaction, etc in it.
Learning Abode XD does not require any theoretical or highly technical background. After understanding the basics, users can easily operate the software. Even if you are a beginner still can create visually pleasant web designs just after learning it.
Interested in learning Adobe XD?
Check out our certificate Adobe XD course that provides training from beginner level to pro. You can also explore our other UI UX design courses to pick the most suitable program for you. For more info, don’t forget to Contact ADMEC Multimedia Institute.
To get more details on the Web Design Courses, book a free counseling session at the Web Development Institute in Delhi.
