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Share Development Specifications

Design specs are awesome. These are in beta. Which basically means that they're not fully featured. They are working and they're great. They're awesome. Instead of just explaining it, why don't I just show you? If you have a project file open, and you're getting, you're at the end of the process. I'm not gonna lie. You're gonna be at the end of the process for this, and what you wanna do now is you wanna send maybe a developer the production ready assets. You wanna send them specifications on font sizes, fonts used, spacing objects, layout grids. Different things you did. We could send them the XD file, but they need XD to open it, okay. We can also share design specs. This is similar to sharing a prototype, but there's a whole lot more you can do. We can do it within XD and when we do it, it's gonna publish this thing to the Creative Cloud. Anybody that wants to view it, we're gonna give them a link. They're gonna log in with their Adobe ID if they wanna do, if they wanna look at it, ...

and they can see what I'm about to show you. So we've got this ready. I'm gonna save it. Save the file. And like I said, this is at the end of the process usually, or you know you're usually making changes and tweaks, but I'm gonna come up to share, and you'll see publish design specs. And once you do this, you can always update it. Excuse me. Update it later. Make versions of it. You can delete these. I'll show you those coming up here soon. But what I wanna do is I'm gonna come up and say you know what? Let's actually either create a design spec link or not. Now right now, I've actually created this once, so it's showing me this. Let me jump over to a file where I didn't actually have that in there. So I'm gonna go to the app final and take a look. So with this file if I go to share what happens is once you actually share, this one has it too. Once you share design specs, it's saved with the file, meaning the fact that you already shared it, okay. So I've already shared this one. What I'm gonna do right now is I'm actually gonna go in and create a new link and show you the process here. So I'm gonna click on new link. As soon as you're ready it's gonna publish these design specs for us, and what it's gonna do it's actually gonna create two versions to start. It's gonna create kind of like a 0.5X and then a 2X. When it's uploading or publishing this, the 0.5X means you can go look at the design specs right away, if maybe it's a big file. That kind of thing. But everything's gonna look, well not everything, but some of the imagery in the content is gonna look a little rasterized maybe. Not quite as high quality. As soon as it's completely finished uploading the design specs, you can then see everything at the full resolution, or whatever the resolution was set at. So, if you look here you're gonna see that it's basically just saying what title do you want? You can give it a title. It's saying what units are you using in it? All I did was it looked at the size of the artboards, and if we used default artboard sizes in here, for IOS for instance or web or whatever it is, it's gonna set the units based on that. So if we set up a web artboard that set up a specific web size, it's gonna set the units at pixels, okay. I'll show you in a second here. Now once you do this, once you create it, you can go look at the link in the browser. So I can click on open link. If you wanna copy the link right here, this is where you go to do it. You can copy it and send it to other people, email, however you do it. Same thing as basically sharing your prototype. They can then click on the link, and open it in the browser to go look at it. So I'm gonna click open link. And you should see, it's gonna take a couple seconds here, but it's basically only doing, or publishing what is connected, okay, and if nothing's connected, it'll publish it all for you. Now, it's publishing out here, and what we can do is we can kind of check out the connections for this. You know I'm gonna do this. This is a little boring. So I'm gonna make a few more connections really quick, and I'll show you how we update. So I'll go back to XD. I'm gonna zoom in a bit. I am in prototype mode. Let me switch over. I'll just make a few connections here, so I'm gonna select maybe this object, and make another connection and say slide. I'm gonna click on this object right here. Make another connection and say slide. And now I've got at least a few connections. We kinda we saw how to make connections before. I made a change. I'm gonna save the file. And I'm gonna republish the design specs, so we can see more artboards. Like I said, anything it's connected will get published if you have connections. So I'm gonna go up to share. Publish design specs. It's the same process every time. I'm gonna come in here and say I'm gonna update the link. Do the 5X, 0.5X. It's gonna update the public link. There we go. Alright so once it's done, I'm gonna click on open link. Take a look at it. And you can see all the things that we have connections to now, okay. Some of the other artboards had connections as well so. Now what we can see out here is we look in this mode or this view, and you can start to see how things are connected together. Think of this. As a developer, I wanna be able to see all this. I wanna be able to see how your flow or your process works. You know what I mean? Like what connections are happening. If we wanna dig in, if you send this to somebody, and they click on an artboard, they can actually start to see the assets or the content for this. So, on the right side of the browser here, it's gonna, it's a little different from the assets panel. What it's doing right now is it's actually looking at everything out there, and it's actually grabbing whatever colors it can find based on content, okay. Now the artboard itself is not really considered that. Okay? 'Cause it's just in the background. So you're gonna see all the different character styles that it's using, finding for the right now, the whole thing. If I come out here and I click on some object like tour for tour guide, the developer for instance, could go out and start seeing or inspecting the different content out here. So I have text selected right now, and you can see over there, I've got the text sizing, and all the fonts and all the formatting, and if we wanna change units out here, you're gonna see that right now, because it realized that this was IOS, it's actually using PT or Point. We could choose DP if we wanna use for Android. We could use PX, whatever we need to set this to, because we can then copy paste this content as a developer for instance and go over to our application, and use it in there. So, right now what I wanna do is this. I'm a developer, pretend. And I'm looking at this. I'm logged in and what I wanna do is I wanna capture the font used. So I clicked on some text. I come over to styles here. And I can click on the main font used, and it's just gonna copy it to my clipboard. I can then go over to what my program I'm using and paste it in there. CSS, whatever it is I'm developing, okay. If you have content and this, sometimes I'm a developer, and I hate having to copy the content, like the text. So this is a great tool. You can actually just select text. Come out here. Click on the content on the right. And it copies it for you. You then go into wherever you're putting this and paste it and you've got the text. It's not formatted. It's just the raw text that you're working with essentially, but that is phenomenal to be able to work with. Now as developer we can also come out here, and we can check out things like scaling, and sizes and distances between objects. You'll notice this. You can see all this happening on here which is great. Alright. Okay now, I'm gonna go over and you can see we can actually between artboards if we want to. We can zoom in. We can zoom out. We can do all kinds of things if we wanna get that done. If I come out here and click on things as well, we can start to see all kinds of different options. Now, they're adding things all the time to this as far as inspecting, working with design specs, so keep checking back on this. You're gonna see there's a lot of things we can do out here. If you wanna zoom, you can zoom. If you wanna go back to the main view where we see all the different screens or artboards, we can click in the upper left corner up there to kind of see everything again. You can use panning and zooming in all different ways to get around in here but this is a great way for us to be able to go in and say, alright developer, alright whoever's gonna create this thing now. Here are the specifications for what I did, for how I laid it out and you can now go forth and use them, and whatever you need to do, okay. So between the assets and this, it's a great way for us to be able to hand off whatever the developer needs. Now last thing here. I'm gonna go back over to XD. If I click off. If you have a prototype, you have an XD file that you open, and you shared it via prototype just for somebody to comment or view, or that kind of thing, or you shared design specs, you can actually go back and see previous versions, and manage those if you want to. Those are stored in Creative Cloud, in your Creative Cloud which is tied to your Adobe ID. If you click there's a couple of places to find this, but if you click on share up here, you're gonna see manage published links. Click on that. And you need to sign in with your Adobe ID. The same Adobe ID that's associated with XD, okay. But in the Creative Cloud in the browser here, you'll see all the different prototypes, all of the different design specs that you've published, and if you look at some of these, you'll actually see it tells you what it is. It's hard to see, I know. But you can see right here it says design spec, and it says prototype here. Great thing about this, if you ever need, somebody has a question about a previous version, that kind of thing, you can at least open the prototype or design spec from a previous version, or the current version and share that with somebody again. So I wanna go back to a previous version or prototype, I can click on it, the thumbnail, or there's a little trash can if you wanna clean these up. There's a lot to get in here. Click on the thumbnail. All it's gonna do is it's gonna save this, this version of the prototype, whatever I saved out. I can then go out and copy that URL, and just email it to somebody if they wanna see it again. This does not mean we're gonna roll back history, or do anything crazy like that. This is just a way for us to go and look back at design specs and prototypes that we've had in the past and either reshare them, or one of the great things I love about doing this is if somebody had made comments on certain artboards, and I wanted to go look back to see on a previous version the comments, maybe to resolve it or check it out. You can always check out the comments member by artboard, so each artboard has a separate set of comments. Anywhere, there we go. That's it. That's essentially allowing us to be able to take what we publish, look at previous versions, delete them if we don't wanna clean things up. View them or visit them again, or even copy paste to send it out again. And remember that when you share a prototype either publishing the prototype or sharing design specs, in the file you did it in, it's actually it's preserved. It's saved up there. So if you ever go to share, go to publish prototype. If you've already created the public link, it'll say update or new, create new. Matter fact, if I go back up here, like I said, publish design specs, it'll always say you've already created one. So do you wanna create a new one or update it? So. There we go. That is not every single thing in Adobe XD, but it's a lot of it and I... I really hope you got something out of this. I know we covered a lot of ground in a short time. That's why we do call this the fast start, and it's to get you an idea of how all this works to get you an overview. Your workflow might be different. You might have different ways you need to go about this. You might use this tool for something completely different. You might just do web design. You might use this to do presentations. I don't know. But kinda keeping all these tools in this generic workflow that I kind of set up here in mind, will really help you going forward.