Adobe XD Video Tutorials

Adobe XD is a versatile user experience design tool that allows Web Designers to build complex, vibrant wireframe designs of user interfaces. Users can then convert those designs into working prototypes to help test and share designs. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning Adobe XD. Videos are free resources that help give students control over their own learning. In addition, the ability to move from video to video helps them not feel locked into one method of learning. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

What is Adobe XD?

Adobe XD is Adobe’s vector-based user interface design tool. XD was designed to address Photoshop’s and Illustrator’s inadequacies as web design tools, and as such, XD is built entirely with user interface design in mind. Users can build vector-based wireframes for websites and share them with other users as functional prototypes of webpages, allowing users to test their own web designs for future iterations. Links, animations, voice responsiveness, and automated scrolling features let users model working websites with complex and interactive features, and collaborative tools allow teams of designers to work together on building web designs.

Adobe XD is one of the newest additions to the Adobe Creative Cloud, and like most Creative Cloud programs, it is designed with heavy Creative Cloud integration in mind. Users can import Photoshop and Illustrator designs and assets as parts of their UI designs, and Adobe InDesign is an ideal tool for building sketches of web pages. Unlike other Adobe Creative Cloud software, XD is still a relatively new tool, meaning that it doesn’t have the decades of iteration and releases that Photoshop and its ilk have received. This means that updates are frequently adding new tools, but it also means that the program hasn’t become an unchallenged industry-standard yet.

Adobe XD is an ideal skill for web designers and UX/UI developers to learn as a dedicated web interface design tool. The ease with which it allows users to build working prototypes of web pages makes the process of testing and iterating on designs faster and more efficient than ever.

Read more about what Adobe XD is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Adobe XD?

Adobe XD is a versatile page layout design application that lets users build realistic, working prototypes of web layouts for testing and collaboration. The software lets users take basic shapes, designs, and applications and build them into vibrant and memorable web page designs. The program then lets users transform those designs into working prototypes within the application so that they may test and update their designs in real-time.

The ease with which Adobe XD allows creatives to build and test designs means that it is incredibly easy to produce a prototype, share it with other users to test the prototype's functionality, and receive feedback from those tests to return to the original design for iteration. This ease assures that designers aren’t having to undertake long, arduous processes every time they want to test a new iteration of a design, meaning that they can test more frequently and with more diverse groups of users.

Creatives who are interested in entering the world of web design and user experience design will greatly benefit from learning user interface design software like Adobe XD. Anyone already familiar with the Adobe Creative Cloud benefits even more from this training. The program is built to help users build the kinds of prototypes they were already using in older programs like Photoshop.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning Adobe XD?

Video tutorials offer a number of benefits for students looking to build a familiarity with Adobe XD and its functionalities. One of the most important advantages is that the vast majority of them are freely available on YouTube or other video-sharing sites. This means that students who aren’t yet familiar with the program won’t have to risk investing anything other than time into their early training. This way, students won’t feel pressured to continue learning a skill that they don’t want to use regularly because they have sunk the cost into paid training.

Additionally, video tutorials have a much more flexible time investment than more traditional venues of skill development training. Since they aren’t live, students have the opportunity to pause, rewind, or speed through content. For students with limited time available, videos can be broken up into segments, and many YouTube tutorials build this into the format, either through timestamps or by offering playlists of multiple short videos. Students who are having difficulty understanding a concept can rewind videos to hear instructions again, or they can pause the video and move to a different browser to either look up a solution to their problem on a search engine or find a different explainer video.

Since switching from one video to another is so easy, video tutorials allow students to explore a number of different tutorials without a great deal of risk. Changing direction in a paid training course may be too difficult or costly for most students, but swapping between video tutorials is incredibly easy. Since there are so many different tutorials available, this lets students have much greater control over their introductory XD training.

Types of Adobe XD Videos

When it comes to video Adobe XD tutorials, students have a number of options available to them. Some videos, like those from Noble, seek to replicate the feel and style of a professional training seminar, guiding students through an in-depth introduction to the basic workings of the program. These videos tend to be longer and produced to scaffold skills, wherein students learn a basic skill at the beginning, and they build up towards more and more complex skills as the video progresses. Many paid video tutorials use this same model.

Noble Desktop offers free video tutorials in Adobe XD and UX/UI design more broadly. On the official Noble YouTube page, users can browse the Web Design and Development playlist to see the free video seminars Noble offers. These seminars, particularly Intro to Adobe XD, will provide students with a basic familiarity with XD and its interface. Students will learn how to produce basic wireframe layouts and how to use some of the tools available in XD to build vibrant and memorable prototypes. Then, students will learn how to share their prototypes for testing and how to collaborate with other designers using XD.

Students seeking broader education in the principles of web design should check out Noble’s Intro to UI and Intro to UX courses. These seminars give students the necessary background in best practices of user interface design and user experience design and a rundown of the kinds of tools that they regularly use in the real world. Learning these skills in advance of learning XD can help students understand how users interact with the interfaces they build, and this training will help students be more attuned to user behavior and feedback when they begin prototyping their designs.

These free tutorials are built to serve as on-ramps for Noble’s more immersive professional training courses. This gives them two major advantages for prospective students. First, this means that students will have a chance to become accustomed to some of the features of an online learning environment. While there are many differences between a live online course and a pre-recorded seminar, some of the structures, such as the reliance on digital video and the process of working with multiple screens, will carry over. Second, and most importantly, these courses will give students the basic skills that Noble online learning courses will introduce near the beginning of the class, which will help keep students from falling behind as they already have a grasp on the basic material.

Students may also wish to consider exploring other video and pre-recorded XD tutorials, many of them available through subscription services using Noble’s On-Demand classes search tool.

Other tutorial videos focus on specific skills and functions within the program, and these are often linked together in playlists or single channels. These videos tend to be much shorter and more compact, focusing on a single topic, such as how to use XD’s voice recognition tools or how to export a file in XD. These videos have the advantage of giving users more control over the direction their learning takes, and they are often times better for consuming in short bursts over multiple sittings.

Finally, some video tutorials are less focused on skills training and more focused on project walkthroughs. These videos show an XD design being taken from start to completion and are useful for process-oriented learners.

Why Learn Adobe XD?

Every minute, approximately 175 new web pages are made. A strong web presence is vital for any business or organization in the modern information economy. This means that Web Designers, User Interface (UI), and User Experience (UX) Designers are in high demand. Organizations need to hire individuals to ensure their web presence consists of memorable, user-friendly, accessible web pages.

One important aspect of building these web pages is the early design process, wherein models and working prototypes are made to test the interface and provide a plan for programmers to build on. This process has been streamlined in recent years thanks to the development of dedicated web page design applications, such as Adobe XD. Designed to serve as a dedicated user interface design tool, XD incorporates many elements of older Adobe programs used to design interface layouts.

Creatives interested in entering the world of web design and user experience design will greatly benefit from learning user interface design software like Adobe XD. Anyone already familiar with the Adobe Creative Cloud benefits even more from this training, as the program is built to help users build the kinds of prototypes they were already using in older programs like Photoshop.

Read more about why you should learn Adobe XD.

How Difficult is It to Learn Adobe XD?

Students looking to learn Adobe XD may find the prospect intimidating, mainly because it is a much newer program than many of the more firmly established, industry-standard Adobe products. Despite its frequent updates, since Adobe XD came out of beta, it has become a common program used by UX and UI Designers, partly because it is fairly easy to pick up and learn. While more advanced features may prove harder to master, students can generally anticipate finding the program relatively approachable before ramping up into more complex designs.

There aren’t any technical prerequisites to learning Adobe XD, but there are a few things that new users should consider making themselves familiar with before they begin trying to learn the program. Students should be familiar with the basics of their computer platform, and if they are planning to use Adobe XD professionally, they should have an understanding of the basics of user interface/user experience design and a sense of where their designs will be used, as to best optimize them during testing.

Adobe XD is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of software tools, meaning that to use the programs, users will need to purchase a Creative Cloud subscription and pay a fee based on their subscription package. There is a free trial available, but once it has expired, users will only be able to access XD while subscribed to the Creative Cloud.

Read about how difficult it is to learn Adobe XD.

Learn Adobe XD with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble offers a number of online options for Adobe XD training. For novice users, the Adobe XD in a Day course provides students with training in the program's basic features, such as how to build a simple wireframe layout and collaborate with other designers. This course is designed to give students the required knowledge to learn more advanced XD skills at their own pace. Adobe XD Advanced offers students this advanced training, building on existing XD skills to teach students how to use scroll groups, animations, and sound effects to create dynamic and complex design prototypes. These courses can be taken together in the Adobe XD Bootcamp.

Noble also offers career-focused training through their Digital Design Certificate and Web Design Certificate programs. These immersive courses teach students the skills they will need in future careers as Digital Designers and Web Designers. The Digital Design Certificate program focuses more on web design's creative and visual side, teaching students how to design assets in Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign to be imported into XD for use in a web layout. The Web Design Certificate focuses on the technical side of the field, teaching students how to code in HTML/CSS and JavaScript to turn their designs into functioning web interfaces.

These certificate programs teach students who want to enter the UX/UI design industry. They come with one-on-one career mentoring sessions and provide industry-recognized certificates of completion, confirming to prospective employers that graduates have received professional training in several important career skills. In addition, because they are hands-on courses, students will participate in practical design exercises and build their own sample designs or working prototypes to place in a sample design portfolio when they enter the job market.