Layers in Adobe XD

 

 

In this blog, we're going to talk about layers in adobe xd. What can you do with layers and how important they are in your workflow? So layers are located right here and if you remember in a previous blog we worked with our library. So when i hover right here it's going to give me this option, so you can view all artboards objects and groups in your document, and once again same as for the libraries,

You can simply click right here to learn how and it's going to take you to xd's website. At the moment we just have these two layers, so when you hover you can mark for export and then you can export this later if you want to.

We have a lock so when you click lock you cannot move this it's going to be locked in place, and you have the height or show right here you can click and drag to reorganize these layers.

 However you want so this is now on top, this is now on the bottom, and then you can hold your ctrl key and hit ctrl g or command g to group them in a group. Now both of them are inside of this group. You can double click on the group to rename it, so for example text and whatever you put inside of this group it's going to be in that group and once again you can mark it for export to a group, so all the contents in the group you can lock to group and you can hide the group altogether.

Now if we want to duplicate this all I need to do is double click inside hit ctrl d and then i’ll be able to duplicate it, and once again this is the same spacing, but now you can see it's on the top.

If you want to change that what you can do is click on the stack. Stack is basically this function and you can see it's reading 60, so when I click right here you can see the 60 is the spacing between these, you can change the orientation of the stack, which is extremely useful and important later on when you start with ui design work.

So when you click right here it's going to change the orientation when you click right here it's going to position them right, here but what I want to do is actually move them right here to the left, so all of them are at 60 and on the left.

If I want to increase the spacing, all I need to do is hold my shift key and click right here it's going to increase the spacing, evenly for all of them or if I want to increase just this all I need to do is simply click and move it right here.

 

Finally, I can just select this group click right here and increase it to 100 from here,, for example, and you can see it increases from here, what you can do is add images icons, all of the elements inside of this group, and you can still organize them.

However you want and this is also important if you're doing responsive resize, for example, so you can set your stack horizontally for website design for the desktop for example, and then for website design for mobile later, you can set it to vertically and all of these items are going to align horizontally or vertically, however, you want to align them, finally what I want to share about groups is you can hit control d for example to duplicate this, and you can see it still contain this stack.

So what you can do is because this has a stack this group and this group has a stack let me move it right here, what you can do is put them in another group, call this for example all text, and then you can create a stack like this, so I’m going to put it right here.

So what you can do is this group has its own stack so for example, I want to set it to 100 but this group is not going to change because it has its own stack, so you can see how useful this is especially,

If for example, you're creating these blog posts, and the text right here is longer than right here if you're creating this description for a person in your team for example and you want to change just that description then it's going to be really useful to work with stacks and to edit it like that.

So basically that's it for the layers and um as you can see they are really quite useful, they're really quite powerful, especially these organizational strategies, so you can position them in groups, you can set these stacks, you can change the position the orientation, it's going to allow you to work much faster.

Especially when you're working with grids, so you can align your text and align your layers to your grids, and then organize them in any kind of way you want. In the next blog, we're going to talk about plugins in adobe xd so i’ll see you there