Understanding the role of learning Adobe XD for a website developer. Let’s get into it.
We navigate to many websites normally. These websites help us get the information and content we are looking for. As users, we expect a good experience on websites, and if the websites are unable to provide that expected experience, it results in a negative impact and potential loss of business. We have plenty of reasons for it, but the website’s UI (User Interface) ranks among the top. Thus, UI designing is a crucial aspect for web designers to prioritize, rather than focusing solely on the coding part.
When it comes to website designing and development, the interface showing how a website will look to its users can be designed using one of Adobe’s popular software, known as Adobe XD.
In this blog, we will go through the role of learning Adobe XD for a website developer. Before that, let’s first quickly know about what exactly Adobe XD is.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a UI design software that enables designers to conceptualize the website’s visual appearance before proceeding to the development stage and ensures the good user experience.
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.
Adobe XD offers a wide range of basic shapes, a line tool, a pen tool, fonts, colors, and more to create and design the user interface.
Let’s delve into the process of creating web UI in XD to better understand its role in overall web development for a web developer.
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
To create the example shown above, we will first create an artboard with the required width for designing the web UI. It supports multiple art-boards. After creating the artboard, we will add and use grid lines based on the artboard’s size 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, images, text, icons, buttons, and so on. After placing all the content in their respective sections, our wireframe will resemble something like this:
Wireframes are created in grayscale mode. This is helpful for developers as it clarifies the positioning of each component using this method. 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 wirframes
Once your wirframes are ready, you need to follow its structure and just need to add images, text, colors, borders etc. of our choice to beautify the web page or you can say to make its visual UI. To save the time and effort of the designer, Xd also provides libraries where the user can save his color and character styles which are used repeatedly in the webpage.
Also, we can use ready made plugins, which can provide us multiple predesigned UI’s to be reused and restyled in other web pages.
Once the designing stage is completed, you have next step to take. The next step is what saves a lot of time for web developers, and that is the prototype.
What is prototype?
Prototyping is used to create interaction links between different artboards and components.
How use 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 at 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 contact us button and 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 successfully complete our task. We can also define trigger, animation and action type to make our designs more pleasant visually.
This also provides a much clear picture to the developer before coding the same.
These all were the major features of Adobe XD.
Minor Features of Adobe XD
Talking about minor, we have still got plenty of them.
Like to manage the components better, we can group them in different categories to arrange the text, shapes and images more systematically.
Another great feature we have in Adobe XD is Repeat Grid.
Repeat grid allows the user to create a group having multiple copies of the selected components both in horizontal as well as vertical direction. 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 format which benefits us in sharing the file with user not having Adobe Xd software installed with them.
Responsive resize
Discussing about minor features, Responsive resize is also a very useful tool. Responsive resize is used when we want to create similar artboard but of different sizes. When responsive resize in On, size of components changes simultaneously when the size of artboard is increased or decreased. This saves a lot of time of designers when they have to create UIs for different sized devices.
Closing remarks
In the end to conclude the matter, we can say that Adobe Xd is a very essential tool for website developers as it prespecifies the whole look and feel of the webpage on how the text, image, header, footer, border, margin, component interaction, etc. will be displayed to the end user. Learning Abode Xd does not require any theoretical or highly technical background knowledge. After understanding the basics, user can easily operate the software and create visually pleasant web designs even if he/she is a beginner.
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.
