Adobe announced today that it is making its Adobe XD design program for Mac, Windows, and mobile free via a new starter plan. The new plan also gives access to Typekit and Creative Cloud libraries, which Adobe says it hopes will empower users to design, prototype and share user experiences with colleagues.
This Starter Plan is perfect aspiring designers, teams and students, and should make it easier for them to share and manage assets across devices. To pair up with this, Adobe is also announcing time-saving updates for Adobe XD which should enable designers to go from concept to prototype faster. See more on these below.
- Sketch and Photoshop CC integration improvements: First announced earlier this year, Adobe released improvements to opening Sketch and Photoshop CC files directly in Adobe XD. The release allows users to import stroke and image effects, and import Photoshop files more quickly to Adobe XD, as well as several conversion fidelity improvements when importing Sketch files.
- Password-protected Design Specs (Beta): Users can enable password protection for design specs to restrict access. The user inputs a password in the Share popup window, before passing the links out, to ensure the security of proprietary designs.
- Simple drag-and-drop options to swap symbols: Drag a symbol from the assets panel and drop it over another symbol to an artboard to update all copies of that symbol.
- Paste to multiple artboards: Copy one element and then select multiple artboards and paste the element to each artboard
Adobe says this starter plan will be available immediately, though users in an active trial of Adobe XD will need to update their version of the platform from the Creative Cloud desktop app or from xd.adobe.com to activate it. Of course, Adobe is hoping this free plan will entice you to subscribe to its other offerings, including the $9.99 Adobe XD Single App plan. While the free starter plan offers 1 active shared prototype and 1 design spec and includes 2GB of free storage, paid plans gives Creative Cloud members unlimited shared prototypes and design specs, and 100GB of storage. Learn more here on Adobe’s website.
