is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
This morning there are two major announcements for Adobe XD, our new end-to-end design, prototyping and sharing app, and I’m proud to say that I’ve played a bit part in both of them. The news can be summed up in two numbers: ten million and zero.
Ten Million
$10,000,000 is the amount of money Adobe is setting aside for the new Adobe Fund for Design, an initiative to help supercharge the design ecosystem. If you’re building design tools, if you have something meaningful to contribute to the future of how designers work, this is for you—the Fund makes investments but it also issues grants, which means it’s open not just to teams of all sizes, but also to individuals. The goal is to inspire anyone with a passion for design tooling to build on top of Adobe XD, obviously, but also to help people bring to life wholly new approaches to the design ecosystem. Find out more about the Fund here.
Zero
$0 is the cost of the brand new Adobe XD Starter Plan. This is an unprecedented move for Adobe: you can now get Adobe XD for free. This isn’t a limited time deal—it’s a new, permanent offering alongside our other Creative Cloud plans. And it’s not an abridged version of the app, either, it’s the real thing. None of XD’s design and prototyping features have been dialed back. You can create an unlimited number of project files, each containing thousands of artboards (XD is wildly performant and won’t blink an eye)—all at no cost. The Starter Plan only limits you to sharing one prototype and one set of design specs at a time, but you can export locally and to services like Zeplin and Avocode with no limits. This fully lowers the barriers for Adobe XD for anyone practicing design, whether you’re a student, a new professional, or you’ve just been curious about Adobe XD and haven’t yet tried it. Get it here.
On top of that, we have our regularly scheduled monthly release of new XD features—read about that here. There’s so much great stuff in the pipeline too, from advanced prototyping to innovative design systems features to truly breakthrough interactivity capabilities, and much more. I’m obviously biased but XD is truly something special. If you haven’t done so already, give it a try here—it won’t cost you a thing.
