By Howard Pinsky
When working on your design projects, especially when clients or stakeholders are involved, you may want to provide frequent updates in a slightly more polished fashion. Let me show you how components can help you do just this.
To start the process I'll hop into the artboard I wish to use and then select all the layers that make up this design. I can quickly do that by selecting the first layer holding down Shift and selecting the last. Now I can convert everything into a single component with many components nested within it. Switching over to the Assets panel I can now see my newly created component where I can drag it on to additional artboards to give the screen a touch of style. I'm going to drag out a rectangle that's the same size and then round out the corners. Then, with both layers selected, I'll mask the component within the shape. Great.
Now that this presentation is set up if I need to make any changes to the home screen, instead of updating it twice, I simply need to jump into the master component and make my changes. Let's look at one more example using a device frame. Over on this artboard I have two iPhones with transparent screens. Just like in the first example I'll select all the elements of the home screen and convert them into a single component. Now I can copy and paste an instance on the "Presentation" artboard and move the component behind the image.
Next, I'll do the same for the expanded player, again making sure to select all elements to include in the component, then I'll place it behind the second frame. With those in place making changes to either screen will push to all instances and since the components also contained instances of the master up top, making updates to that will reflect everywhere including on our presentations.
And that's how you can take components even further keeping multiple screens all up to date.
If you're working with other stakeholders or clients, presenting your work and maintaining up to date presentations through various iterations can be an important piece of the design process. Using components in Adobe XD, presentations can be kept up to date as changes are made to designs and design elements. Learn from Howard Pinsky how to leverage components in your Adobe XD presentations to streamline your workflow.
