I recently covered some Project Comet updates hinting at more news in Q1 2016. Turns out this was true since Adobe just announced the official rebranding of Comet to Experience Design CC.
Classified as Adobe XD, this is Comet’s first public release preview. The download is exclusive to Mac so Windows designers are, once again, completely out of luck. But Adobe has stated their plans to get XD ready for Windows by the official release date.
So far opinions have varied from supportive yet inquisitive to outright disappointed. Many features are completely missing like a color picker, type panel, and even the layers panel.
There are some online video tutorials made by Adobe showing how to perform certain actions. But even with all these great features, it’s clear that Adobe XD isn’t ready for a production environment—yet.
This is only a preview release so it’s fair to assume Adobe’s team is hard at work gathering feedback from testers. Improvements are always possible and XD is certainly a potential Sketch competitor.
Like all Adobe products, XD is built into a common workflow with other programs including Photoshop and Illustrator. Granted this workflow has yet to be perfected… but like all great things, progress takes time.
Many designers would argue this is an underwhelming release. It’s not because XD is bad, but rather because this preview is missing fundamental features. As product designer Daniel Adams describes it:
My first impression was that Sketch and InVision had an accident and this is the result.
Please keep in mind this is only a preview release. It’s nothing short of a public beta and certainly not a version 1.0 release.
Myself and other designers have high hopes for Adobe XD if the team can implement all the required features to compare with tools like Sketch or InVision.
If you want to try it out just visit the Experience Design CC webpage and download the preview. It does require an Adobe account to download, but it’s free to signup and free to download.
You can stay on top of future news by following the Experience Design tag on Adobe’s blog, or by following the official Twitter account @AdobeUX.
The CC team also put out a video preview that you can watch below:
Jaime is a jr. designer interested in mobile UI/UX research and frontend web development with JavaScript frameworks. He covers general news and useful resources in the web design space.
