Create a Buttons Library in Adobe

Using Components and Linked Assets

Adobe just released its latest Adobe XD 19 update with many many much-needed features including components, responsive components, and component overrides which allows us to create some powerful libraries for our designs.

To show you just how powerful the aforementioned features are, I put together this video showcasing components and linked assets in action.

You can follow along in this video to create your own buttons library or you can download my buttons library document here.

 

These new features really release the limitations of what you can do. I know many of you are thinking, “All the other design tools have these kinds of features” but let me tell you, there is no program out there that has thought about and polished these features more than adobe. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Responsive Components

Yes, sketch, Figma, and others have components/symbols that are responsive but you have to manually set the constraints. With Adobe XD, as soon as you convert your layers to a component, Adobe XD does all the guessing for you to give you an automatically responsive component. You can always override the constraints too but this can save you hours when creating your design system.

Component Overrides

Many other design tools also allow you to override the visibility of objects, colors, shadows, etc. But none of the others allow you to override EVERYTHING as adobe XD does. In the past, I’ve always had to deal with the frustration of breaking apart a component to move the position of objects inside and it wasn’t possible to add completely new objects to child-components.

In Adobe XD, you can drill into a child component and move everything around as if it was a group. You can change the text size, move it around, change the corner radiuses, etc and the master component stays as is while your child unleashes from the tight control that symbols once had. The amazing thing that I found was the ability to add completely new layers to a child component. And if you ever change the master component, the child will still adopt all the changes that have not been overridden.

Artboard Guides

As simple as they need to be without adding bulk to the UI. Simply drag guides from the sides or top to place them on your artboard.

Linked Assets

Design systems are important to many organizations as they scale their designs and Adobe XD has done a great job giving us features we need to grow with our designs. You can create components, characters styles, colors, and more in one document and simply save it to the Adobe Creative Cloud. When you open any new document, you can link these assets and your document will always be on the lookout for new changes within the design system.

If you don’t know where your design library document is to make changes to the master components, you can right-click on any child component and click “Edit Master in Source Document” to quickly jump to that component and make those changes.

There are many other features I won’t cover (and that you can see in the video) and if you have had experience with these other design tools, you can appreciate how much thought Adobe XD has put into making each one of the features the best they can be!