By Dani Beaumont
A few months ago we delivered the ability to open Sketch files directly within Adobe XD, carrying over artboards, layers, symbols and effects. The response from our users has been overwhelmingly positive in this month's release of Adobe XD. We're continuing to improve on the Sketch file conversion while implementing some of the workflow enhancements requested by customers like you. Let me take you through some of the improvements we've made.
I'm here in my Sketch application and let me point out a few aspects of this file. You'll notice on the upper left-hand corner I have the concept of pages. This allows me to kind of organise my thoughts into particular "gatherings" rather than one large design canvas with multiple artboards I can break out into pages. So I've got the mobile flow that's on this individual page. If I click into Exploration I have some design explorations. And then if I click onto Symbols, I can see all of the symbols that are used in this particular project. The next thing I want to point out if I look back to the mobile flow, you'll notice that Sketch now natively supports the ability to wire together individual artboards into a flow and I have a number of wires that are defined connecting my individual artboards together. Lastly if I click any individual item here on the design canvas and then drill down to the Colour panel, you'll notice that I have a number of different colour swatches in this design. Some are what are known as global colours. These are colours that are persistent across Sketch projects. So whenever I open a new file those colours will be there. I also have document-specific colours. These are colours that occur just in this particular project. Let's go ahead now and open up this file in Adobe XD.
There are a number of ways I can open up the Sketch file. I can just drag the Sketch icon onto the XD application icon. I can right-click and select XD as an application source I can come directly into XD and open it as though I were opening an XD file. So if I just click open, I'll select that native Sketch file and click open. Now XD is going to come through and convert all of that Sketch source content over to XD, but the process happens very quickly. Now the first thing you'll notice if you're familiar with the Sketch to XD workflow is that we've now started to categorise content from individual Sketch pages into groupings on the design canvas. So I've got the mobile flow page the exploration page. I also have a page for symbols the symbols have already been loaded into the assets panel. So if I want a little less clutter, I can just select the symbols on the canvas and delete them. Next thing you want to notice is if I zoom on into let's say the mobile flow layout and scroll this up a bit, when I switch over to Prototype mode and select all of my artboards, notice that the flow has been preserved. Any wires that I defined in Sketch carry over directly into XD. I'll go ahead and switch back to design mode and let's zoom in on some of the individual artboard details.
If you remember in Sketch I went ahead and apply different image effects to my images. They've been flattened and preserved here in XD. If I come in and select an individual colour, so an object that has a colour fill in the Fill panel. We now include not only the document-specific colours these towards the bottom. But any global colours that might have been defined in the Sketch source file carry over in that colour panel. If I want to convert my colours into individual styles that I can change globally I can do that easily if I move so that I can see more of the artboards on the canvas. I'll come in and select a few of the artboards and in the Assets panel up towards the top in the colours area. If I hit the + sign it's going to basically load those colours as a global attribute.
If I come in now and edit any one of those colour instances, notice that it updates on the design canvas to the colour that I've selected. Well now that I've imported this file from Sketch to XD. I can continue to take advantage of the unique XD features and take my work further. All I need to do is pull down on File > Save and it will save out as a native XD file.
Please do continue to let us know the features you'd like to see here going forward as you try out these enhancements yourself.
Importing Sketch files into Adobe XD is as simple as selecting "Open with XD' in the right-click menu of your file browser. Sketch files will be converted to editable Adobe XD files, making it easy to extend designs created in Sketch using the powerful prototyping features in Adobe XD. Symbols will be converted to components and colours and effects will be preserved when Sketch documents are converted into Adobe XD, making it easy to pick up where you left off.
