Formerly known as Project Comet, Adobe finally unleashed its new tool tailored for UI Design: Adobe Experience Design CC. What a mouthful!
The main catch of XD (seriously?) is the ability to both design and prototype UI projects within the same app in an extremely seamless manner. It can also fix the tedium of mundane tasks in the interface design process like repeating grids, cells, dummy text/images and so on with its own arsenal of tools that helps designers avoid going crazy during these long sprints.
You can read more about XD, download XD and try out XD for yourself by clicking here.
Maggie Appleton (Illustrator): I played with it... too much is missing. No grids, no color picker. Unusable for now.
Juan Herrera (Designer): The interface is so sleek it looks like a Dribbble post; take that as you will... It's really promising, but I love me some Sketch, and I don't see that changing in the near future. Still, some competition is good for everybody.
OTHER DESIGN-RELEVANT NEWS
...HOWEVER INVISION HAS AN ACE UP ITS SLEEVE!
Pretty much immediately after XD's announcement, inVision revealed its acquisition of Sketch prototyping plugin Silver Flows and teased the upcoming release of Craft 2 and its main feature: built-in prototyping. What does all of this mean? Well, between XD and the Sketch + inVision + Craft combo, nothing but joy for us designers!
Marian Fusek (Designer): I feel certain satisfaction each time I see the line “Clark from inVision” in my inbox. InVision is on the case... the ecosystem of design collaboration is growing, and this is a much needed part that will make our workflow simpler and somehow unified under one roof. What is next? Integrated Slack plugin for making revisions? Voice replies? Clark?
INTRODUCING BOTTOM BAR NAVIGATION IN ANDROID
Some people saw this coming after the Google Photos app suddenly and inconspicuously introduced what looked like... a tab bar?! Considering phones are getting bigger and that hamburger menus are generally not the best pattern for user engagement, this could be a really good improvement over the platform.
Tomas Garba (Android Developer): I think this is great. People will welcome this and adapt to it fairly quickly since it's so close to the functional keys... bottom navigation should be really easy to pull off in the platform.
IN DEFENSE OF HOMOGENEOUS DESIGN
The topic of how "every product landing page looks the same" is one that keeps popping up every now and then in design communities... usually right after someone asked whether designers should learn code or not for the 843th time. However, good lad Yaron Schoen took to his own hands to defend this "sameness epidemic" in an intelligent, eloquent manner that is definitely worth looking into.
Juan Herrera (Designer): Really good read, the analogy with the jackets is pretty spot on. Think of your users, people; there's no need to try to reinvent the wheel for every single thing you do!
SO, WE WENT ON THE INTERNET AND FOUND...
This tweet - Especially relevant after reading the article of homogeneity in design. We laughed at this.
Ryan Putnam's Instagram - Some of us in the Design Camp like drooling over Putnam's (formerly of Dropbox fame, among others) work, and his Instagram is no exception. Such a delight to see!
Printed by Somerset - One of the quirkiest and most memorable (as well as being probably the most skeuomorphic) websites we've ever come across in this lovely corner.
