By Dani Beaumont
When you build out an interface with lots of UI elements your design can become pretty complex pretty quickly. Grouping elements together is one way to organise that content, but editing objects once in a group can be quite a hassle. In the latest release of Adobe XD, we've enhanced the direct selection tool, making selecting content across groups much more powerful. Let me show you what I mean.
I'm here in Adobe XD and I'm working on this Pablo artboard and I like the green images, but I feel like I need to play with the opacity for that green colour a little bit just to make it more visible. Now if I want to just come in and select this first image here on the left-hand side. When I click the first time, notice in the Layers panel. I've selected a group of objects that includes that image. The direct selection tool allows me to click off here for a second and hold Shift and CMD on a Mac or Shift-Ctrl on Windows and then click right there to select the image that I want. Notice that it tunneled into that group and selected the actual image. In the latest release of Adobe XD I not only have the ability to do this on an individual group, but I can now direct select across groups.
So I'll go ahead and with those keyboard command still held down, click a second image in that same group and I'll click a third image here in a totally separate group. Notice in the Layers panel I'm getting a nice set of selected images. I can also click a totally different artboard if I'd like and select it as part of that group set. I'll click off for a moment and stick with the three that I have here on this main artboard. Now that I have these objects selected across multiple groups, I can come in and for example duplicate those images by hitting CMD-D or Ctrl-D on Windows. Notice when I duplicate them each individual image duplicates, but it remains in its hierarchical location in the group set. So that first image of "Image Leave 02" are in the same location. I've got the second image here "Image Leaves" and down towards the bottom I've got the other two. Alternatively when I select these images, I can easily drag them to another location within the group set. So with them selected I'm going to come on in here and just press and drag let's say right up to the root level of the hero group set. So they're moved to that new location.
This is quite a subtle enhancement, but as your work becomes more complex with lots of elements in groups, I think you'll find this to be a real productivity enhancement. I encourage you to give it a try.
Updating layers or objects across multiple groups is easily done in Adobe XD. Using keyboard shortcuts Shift + Ctrl (Windows) or Shift + Command (Mac), you can select multiple objects across groups to make bulk edits or reposition those elements on canvas. This makes it easy to manipulate elements from different groups without breaking down groups and creating new ones.
