Adobe Opens Up Its Design Tool With Support for Third-Party Plugins

Adobe is opening up its design tool, Adobe XD, with new APIs. The company today announced it’s working with some of its partners to build a bunch of different third-party plugins, as well as integrations that will help designers get more out of XD.

Starting today, Adobe XD now integrates better with tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack to offer richer previews and updates from projects for designers. These new integrations are just the beginning, and Adobe hopes to integrate more third-party services going forward.

More importantly, though, Adobe XD’s upcoming APIs will allow developers to build any kind of plugin for the design tool. They can build plugins that can automate workflows, and connect XD to other external services. “Whether you want the ability to design with real data or check your designs against accessibility standards, or you want to automate repetitive tasks like renaming artboards, or you want to connect to your favorite collaboration or project management service, you’ll soon have an ecosystem of plugins to help. And, if you don’t find the one you’re looking for, or you have a crazy idea you want to explore, the platform will be open, so you can build it yourself,” Adobe said in a blog post.

Adobe says it has worked with Microsoft, Google Cloud, Dribbble, Trello, and others to build the new platform. It’s not clear exactly when the new APIs will be made available, but they do sound promising. There’s a ton of design tools available right now, and the competition in the market is very high. Adobe XD has mostly been lacking in terms of features, especially when compared to tools like Framer X, Sketch, and Figma. Adobe still has a lot of catching up to do, though the new APIs could really make the design tool a lot more powerful in no time.