I’m super proud to announce that not one, but two new courses have been released on LinkedIn Learning. And both cover Adobe XD, the best UX design and prototyping tool out there.

Using Adobe XD with the Creative Cloud Apps

In addition to all the tools and plug-ins that make Adobe XD a standout design tool, a key advantage of XD is its place in the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. In this course, Bart Van de Wiele shows how you can leverage the strength of XD with other design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Stock. He shows how to open and place native Illustrator and Photoshop content into Adobe XD, how to share and update content with Creative Cloud Libraries, and how to leverage Adobe Stock in your creative process. In addition to showing how to bring content into Adobe XD, Bart also shows how to export content out of XD and use it in other design applications.

Kick-starting Adobe XD projects with Adobe Creative Cloud from Using Adobe XD with the Creative Cloud Apps by Bart Van de Wiele

Adobe XD Plug-Ins: The 2021 ‘Must-Have’ List

Adobe XD’s third-party plug-in ecosystem is extremely rich and broad, with over 300 different plugins available to help you better design, prototype, and collaborate when building an interactive user experience. In fact, there are so many options that you might feel just a little overwhelmed. Where do you start? In this course, instructor Bart Van de Wiele’s takes you through his must-have list of Adobe XD plug-ins for UX designers in 2021. He sorted through the extensive library and picked his top choices for designing user experiences, presentations, and interactive prototypes, so you can skip that time-consuming process and get right to learning how to actually use the plug-ins.

Hidden gems to boost your productivity from Adobe XD Plug-Ins: The 2021 Must-Have List by Bart Van de Wiele

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Design the icons you want

My third course on LinkedIn Learning has just been released: Creating Icons with Adobe Illustrator. And of course as the title suggests, this is all about learning how to create your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. This course provides an overview of what an icon is and its key characteristics, then teaches you how to design your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. Instructor Bart Van de Wiele explores why you need icons, how you use them, and why scalability is important. Bart steps you through how to set up your Illustrator document before you begin your design process. He describes how to organize your work using Illustrator artboards for arranging, naming, and exporting your icons. Bart walks you through ways to import your sketch into Illustrator, then goes over how to clean up your sketch digitally. He shows you how to use simple, complex, and compound shapes to build your logo digitally, then explores several more advanced techniques. In conclusion, Bart covers best practices for exporting your icons for the web, for print, and for use in other applications like Photoshop.

Fast and efficient icon creation from Creating Icons with Illustrator by Bart Van de Wiele

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After much hard work I’m proud to announce my second course has just been released on LinkedIn Learning. Adobe Color Essentials will take you on an explorative journey filled with color and inspiration. During this course, I will teach you how to use all of Adobe Color’s features
and how they fit in your daily design routine. Taking you from the fundamentals of creating a color group to managing colors in Creative Cloud Libraries and tips on how to apply, share and save them. No stone will be left unturned as the second half of this course shifts from creating and exploring colors to teaching you some of the unique color manipulation features available within Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

A colorful journey from Adobe Color Essential Training by Bart Van de Wiele

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This is something that’s been on my bucket list for a long time and was finally able to make this a reality. In January of this year I traveled to sunny Carpinteria (CA, USA) to record my first LinkedIn Learning course (formally Lynda.com). I am not new to the world of recording, however this was my first time working on a personal project of this size. And instead of recording short videos from the safety of my home office, I spent a good amount of days in a professional recording booth working with my producer.

The result: Photoshop-Illustrator-InDesign Powercombo for Design

As a designer, you’re used to using a myriad of different tools, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. And often, you need to place, import, or paste content from one of these applications into another. But choosing the wrong technique or file format can sometimes lead to restrictions in your workflow. Typical symptoms of this are difficulties round-tripping between applications, having to flatten layers, or having to save multiple versions of the same file. All of this can result in lost time or unnecessary additional files for you to manage. In this course, we explore the best ways to navigate Adobe’s flagship applications, using real-life production techniques you can apply in your print or online design workflows.

The courses is designed for anyone that wants to do more with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign and includes both old and new techniques. The inspiration for my course came from my years working as a designer. I almost every project in this course is based on a specific project or situation that I encountered myself and was able to solve using these exact same techniques. So I hope this course will be useful to everyone.

Be sure to check out my course and try some of the free videos!

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