By Dani Beaumont
Adobe XD as part of the Creative Cloud enjoys a seamless integration with other applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. Over the past few releases of XD, we've continued to improve the speed and quality of these file conversions in this latest release of Adobe XD. We're taking integration one step further with support for copying XD vector content to the clipboard then pasting it as editable vector content back into Adobe Illustrator.
This workflow can be really handy when you're creating complex vector content like a series of icons or logo designs. I'm here in Adobe XD and I want to add some icons to a design I've been working on. I really like one of the UI kits called Tractiv by Cody Brown. I've gone in and downloaded it from the Internet by pulling down on File > Get UI Kits and then browsing on the More UI Kits page on Adobe.com. I have the file downloaded to my machine, and I opened it up, and if I select this artboard here and zoom on it I can see there's a series of icons I'd like to work with. I can come in and select these icons and just copy them to the clipboard by selecting Edit > Copy. When I switch now over to my working design I've got a set of icons that I'm already using and I want to add these to it for that. I'll go ahead and select "Paste" and paste it onto the clipboard now, I noticed that when I look at them in comparison to my other icons, they look a little light. right in the line weight. If I keep these objects selected and just resize the icons I'm capable of resizing the overall icon, but the line weight does not scale. That's something that XD doesn't do that Illustator does really well.
Let me go ahead and undo that change, and with that object still on the clipboard, I'll switch over to Adobe Illustrator, and I'm just going to select Edit > Paste, and paste the icons on the canvas. Now that I have them here, I'm going to switch to my Scale tool, and I'll come in and scale these icons to something a little more consistent with what I have in mind. With those objects still selected, again I'm going to pull down on Edit > Copy it back onto the clipboard. I'll swing back over into XD and go ahead and paste the new icons here on the design canvas. So notice that they not only are larger in this case, but the line weight have been scaled up as well. What were using on the clipboard here is something known as .svg, or scalable vector graphics which are native to many modern web browsers and resolution-independent.
When I export this content out of XD for my developer I can save the icons in the .svg format. Now one thing you'll want to keep in mind is you want to make sure you've installed the latest version of Adobe Illustrator, which would be 20 3.0.2 or later in order to make sure you have consistency between those clipboards.
This is just a quick example of the workflow. Keep in mind that can always continue to use File > Open or File > Import to bring illustrator content into my working design depending on what it is I'm trying to do. I encourage you to give this new productivity enhancement a try.
Learn how to seamlessly move vector assets between Adobe XD and Illustrator with copy and paste actions. Copy a vector element in Adobe XD and paste it in Illustrator to make use of Illustrators advanced vector editing tools. When your design is ready to be included in XD, simply copy the asset from Illustrator and paste it back into your design in Adobe XD where it can continue to be edited or converted to a reusable component.
