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

The post Two new Adobe XD courses released on LinkedIn Learning appeared first on Bart Van de Wiele.

What are we talking about?

Creative Cloud libraries were introduced in 2015 and quickly grew to be one of the best services that Creative Cloud has to offer. It’s a bridge from your CC storage and CC mobile apps to your main desktop applications. Use it to collect all the essential designer building blocks, including text styles, colors, vector shapes, layer styles and much more. This made it especially useful for collecting artwork for specific projects or clients. And such a feature just begs a user to start collaborating between colleagues, teams, external parties and clients.

Libraries stored in the Creative Cloud dashboard.

How to share libraries

About a week ago we had 2 ways of sharing libraries:

1. Share a link: Sharing a link did exactly that. Your CC library, safely stored behind your CC membership login and password, would become a public link that anyone can access. Opening up this link in a web browser would allow the viewer to inspect the contents of the library and, optionally, copy over the library into their own CC account. This is still a great way distribute to a set of graphics and other design objects to e.g. freelancers when accepting a project. At Adobe we even use this ourselves to share demo files with colleagues worldwide. Do keep in mind that the recipient copies the library into their own account. This means that there’s no live link to the original library thus the initiator’s library can never be altered by the recipients. And what if you make a mistake and mess up your copied library? Well, just do the same thing you do when downloading something from the internet: download a fresh copy. (Of course, under the condition that the link is still active).
2. Collaborate with others: When you choose to collaborate with others you’re sharing the same library with an individual or group of people. So this means you’re letting other people into your own library. In this scenario, up until a few days ago, anyone who had access to the library could also alter it. And of course this is always a double edged sword since someone can make a great addition to the library or keep it up to date. But someone else might also unexpectedly delete an item or change something that they shouldn’t, or even add content. Meaning there were scenarios where certain individuals required read-access but not write-access. For example imagine showcasing a mood board or other designs in a library to a client. You want them to look at the contents of the library, but not change anything. And that day has finally arrived.

How it works

Today, when you invite people to collaborate with you it’s up to the initiator (let’s call him “the librarian”) to decide which user has which rights. Choosing “can edit” will have the effect of a “normal” collaboration, just like before. But when choosing “can view” you’re limiting the recipient’s options to only viewing the content.

Also, keep these extra bullet points in mind for read-only users (as they exist at the time of this writing):

• Users can share the library as a public link with others, but also still with the limitation of being read-only.
• Users can’t change their own rights nor those of other collaborators.
• Users can unshare the library and leave the collaboration.
• Users can copy individual items to their own library folder and change them (only in their private environment since that other library isn’t shared with others).

If you want to learn more about collaboration using libraries check out this page.

The post Creative Cloud Libraries with read-only access appeared first on Bart Van de Wiele.

Adobe CreateNow event

During the CreateNow event Dimitri and I will showcase the latest Creative Cloud features and services, share tips and other need to know CC information. If you’re using Adobe Creative Cloud today then you have no excuse to miss these events. You’ll learn now things and get to network with peers.

The first session will be held on 04/11/2014, presented in Dutch. The second session is later this week on 06/11/2014 and is presented in French. You can find more information and an enrolment form here.

Digital Publishing Event

This event will be held on 18/11/2014 and is presented in Dutch. The digital publishing lanscape is constantly evolving because of the constant evolution of mobile devices and ever growing market. But many designers have lost track of what digital publishing is actually about. What’s the difference between an interactive PDF, ePub, iBook or an app? And what should you look out for when staring your digital publishing business? These and many other questions will be answered during a half day presentation. Click here for more information.

The post Attend one of my upcoming events appeared first on Bart Van de Wiele.