6.1 5 Top Plugins for Advanced Users

Welcome back to the course. In this final lesson, I'm gonna show you five plugins that I consider to be a must have for any XD user. And these will augment your experience in XD and will make certain tasks a lot easier to accomplish. So, let's have a look at those five plugins The first one is called Rename It. And this is a plugin that allows you to, well, keep your XD files organized, and you can batch rename the layers, artboards and all that good stuff. Now, I will just like to mention that all the plugins that I show you here can be installed from Adobe XD. You just need to go to the plugins tab here, click on the plus sign and just browse and search for the proper plugin, and then just hit install from this link here. So Rename It, this is a very useful plugin for when you want to batch rename artboards layers and so on. And I'm not gonna spend too much time on these plugins, I'm just gonna show you their basic functionality and I'll let you discover the rest of what they can do. So for example, we have a couple of layers here, and they're all cold field. Now, instead of manually renaming all of these, I can simply select all of them. I can go to my plugins tab, Rename It, rename selected layers, or use the keyboard shortcuts for your system. So let's rename these and let's say I wanna call them rows, and here you can see a preview of what they will look like. And you can also add like numbers to the final sequence, here is ascending, descending. You can also add like a parent name. So for example, you can do percentage, o and then a dash, and then maybe you wanna do another dash here and you get this bit. Once you're happy with the changes, hit Rename and all those layers are now renamed. Very, very useful. It can also change from uppercase to lowercase. There are tons of stuff you can do with Rename It, so make sure you install it and discover everything that it can do. The next plugin is called the UI Faces, and I'm sure you know the website, UI Faces. This is basically a website you can get a bunch of avatars for your website design, and there are plugins for all the major design softwares out there. For Adobe XD it works very simply like, so you select the avatars or the shapes that you want to contain outdoors. In your app you go to plugins, UI Faces, you select the source that you want for those images, you can of course go and check out some advanced options here. But you basically can hit apply and the plugin will download images and will apply them to those shapes you selected. Very, very useful. You can also select photos, if that's what you want. You have currently six selected shapes and you can go ahead and select the ones that you want from this list. And then you would hit apply, and it's gonna apply them like so. Now this next plugin is called Google Sheets. And it basically allows you to load the information from a Google Sheet or a CSV file, and paste that in certain fields in your design. So to show you an example I have created a simple Google spreadsheet with some information here, I have name, message and picture. And for each of these I filled in some random information along with some picture links from unplash. And let's say I want to place this information right here in this design, so the name would go here, message here and picture here. Well, that's really easy to do with this plugin. Basically, you select the parent element, you go to Google Sheets, open up the panel, this is gonna show you the elements that you have selected. And then you go to source and you can paste a URL link, you can go to Google Sheets, or you can upload a CSV file. I'm gonna paste the URL link and I'm gonna hit import, right? So that's gonna read the information that I have here. It's gonna determine that there are three categories, name, message and picture. And it's gonna ask me how to map that information to my elements. So for example, the message in my design will map to the message field from my CSV. The name in my design, which is this, will map to the name I have in my file, bg, I don't wanna map that. Anything, divider, avatar, badge from these, I only want to map the avatar to picture, okay? So once that is done, I can hit apply, right? So as you can see the text content was inserted almost immediately. But right now I'm just waiting for the images to be downloaded and applied to my shapes. Now, this is a very useful plugin for when you have a lot of repeating elements in a layout. And you don't wanna populate them every time with different data, right? You have some spreadsheets somewhere saved or some CSV files, and you can use those or that information in all of your designs. This is a very fast way of doing things, especially when adding placeholder content. And just like that, you saw the plugin also downloaded the pictures and applied them exactly to the shapes that I told it to. You can randomize the content if you want to, and you can hit refresh, or you can load a totally different file if you want that. But that is the Google Sheets plugin. Our next plugin is called Icons 4 Design, and this basically gives you access to over 5,000 icons. To open it up up you can go to plugins and open up Icons 4 Design. And you can search for specific icons, for example, let's search for users. And this gives you all the icons that match your search criteria from various icon sets. So I have this demo set up here where I'm missing some icons, right? So I can simply click and that's gonna paste an icon in my artboard and I can simply come in here, paste it. I can align it like so, I can resize it and I can give it a proper color, maybe something like that, I don't know. What else do I have next? Settings, right? I can search for settings and I can grab an icon that I feel would work best for what I need here. There we go, that's the settings icon. I can look at some of the other icons in here and I can see that they're 22 pixels high, and I can adjust that to match. And I can of course, change the color to this as well, and I can do the same for notifications. So Icons 4 Design, a great little plugin that you can use if you don't wanna bother with organizing your own icons, or if you just want something really quick. The final plugin is unDraw, which allows you to download free illustrations to Adobe XD directly from the interface. Now unDraw is a website that you can download these very cool illustrations, and you can change their colors, and all of these come in the form of SVG files. Well, with the XD plugin I can simply open it up, and we can slug the illustration that you want, copy. And that's been automatically copied to our clipboard, so now we just need to paste it, whatever you want to, in your artboard, how easy is that? And you have a lot of illustrations to choose from. So yeah, unDraw, great little plugin, you can also search for illustrations. And if you wanna change your colors it's actually very easy, once you download an SVG it automatically adds that color to your assets panel. So you can actually now just edit that color and make that illustration, any color that you want, it's really that easy. And these are the five plugins that I think you should definitely get if you're using Adobe XD. All right, and that's it for this course. I hope it was useful and you were able to learn some of the more advanced aspects of Adobe XD. Thank you very much for watching, I'm Adi Purdila and until next time, take care.