Global Style/Color Edits
Provide the ability to change multiple objects/elements within a document and/or across artboards.
Example: Ability to increase font size within a button across all artboards (without multi-select)
This is similar to increasing font size within a repeatable grid—all increase.
Another example: replace/swap a theme color throughout the document.
Peter DiBartolo
shared this idea
Hi XD Community,
I’m glad to announce that you could do global character style or color edits in XD through the assets panel. Just add your colors and character styles to the assets panel, and once you edit any of the color / character style properties in the assets panel, those edits will propagate to all objects or symbols that inherit those properties.
ProTip – Color Merging in the assets panel: you could also merge colors in the assets panel by copying the Hex value of one color and pasting it into another. All objects or symbols that have the old color will automatically inherit the new merged color.
To learn more about managing your colors and character styles in XD’s assets panel, please check the following resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5khe2H2-c
https://helpx.adobe.com/xd/help/assets-symbols.html
If you have any feedback or suggestions around how to improve this feature and other assets panel features, please create a new feature request on UserVoice.
Best,
Sherif Assaf
110 comments
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Anonymous
commented
Character and paragraf styles are used in InDesign and it is great function, I miss them. It is very easy and functional
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Anonymous
commented
The ability to globally manage character, paragraph, and graphic styles is, to my mind, a critical feature for a program dedicated to designing multi-page / multi-state systems.
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Zack Keys
commented
One of my biggest issues with Sketch is the inability to separate Paragraph styles from character styles like you can in Adobe programs.
For example, I want to have a .bodyCopy style that would apply to all of my paragraph content in a design. However, I also want to have substyles (just like I would in a stylesheet) for things like Strong, Italic or hyperlinks. Currently, Sketch only allows one style for any block of copy.
It would make a strong argument for Comet if I could have Parent and Child styles for layout concepts.
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Michal Svoboda
commented
Agree with all things Max Neuse said... with this functionality, it will be easily "game changer"... so we can switch from other software to this "preview" version and forgive lack of other functionality (o;
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Dee Sadler
commented
Even something like Fireworks had is essential. Styles easily applied, or globally applied.
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Max Neuse
commented
This would be so important! Sketch tried to implement such a function, but it didn't worked for daily business, so I went back to photoshop.
For me, also in collaboration with colleagues a function to define and edit styles globally would be so helpful and would save so much time.For example text-styled:
I wish to define a large headline with it's font-family, font-size and line-height and save it as 'large-headline' - when I create a new one after this, I can set new styles or choose the defined stlye out a project libary. When I change a headline with this style, every headline in the project changes. Up to here, Sketch offed this functionality, but it is pretty important, to let the user choose, which styles should be saved in this global style. When I need the large headline once centered, once left align, once black, I needed a new who style for each case. This is stupid, cause in CSS you set these proporties not globally. I wish to define by myself, if I would just save font-family, line-height and font-weight or additionally color or alignment...
Sketch did much right, but did not thought it to the end unfortunately...
The great thing on that would be, that it is pretty easy for yourself and for everybody else to make a consistent design over all project-sizes.Same for Buttons. For Sketch there was a great dynamic button tool. I think everybody who was working with sketch loved it. You can define a global button style, but change the text individually. With a simple shortcut, the button sizes to the new text. If you designed 30+ artboards and the client do not like the style of the button anymore, it was so easy to just change the button. Really awesome. (a bit like smart-objects in photoshop, but there you wasn't able the change anything individually).
Same you can do with colors. If I define a grey and want to make it darker, every shape or text with this color-style changes.... So especially in collaboration with others, you avoid the have 3 or 4 different, but same looking grey tones... lovely!
And absolut high class would be to define styles for objects. For example when I design a box with product informatioen (Box, Image, 2 types of text, Button). I wish to have the possibilty to use different picture, and different text styles but same for every object style. So when I Change the the size of the image, every image-size is changing. Would also be good for highly recurring elements like navigation, footer and so on.
The aim should be, the make a consistent design and have a living style guide, so that things can me easily implemented from the development. Sketch also got a wonderful Plugin, which was building a styleguide (https://github.com/getflourish/Sketch-Style-Inventory) out of all styles you used. Absolutely awesome, but the whole thing failed on the way, how sketch is managing styles - this is simply not useable.
If you would implement such a feature, a dream would come true :)
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Jacob Falk
commented
Especially font styles are important to me, because even after everything is almost done, you almost always want to tweak the text a bit before the final design is done, and if you have to flip through the entire document, hunting down all instances of a particular font-style, you will waste an immense amount of time
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Boti
commented
I frequently use colorfill-layers in smart objects as global colors in photoshop for ui design. I append these smart objects as clipping masks to my layers so i can change the color of multiple elements simultaneously.
But this workflow has some cons which i think we could solve far better in XD.My desired workflow would be:
1. Define root colors which can be CI colors of clients, primary and accent colors of android, main and tint colors in iOS or whatever i want to define.2. Define color variables for certain things. i.e. NavbarColor, LightTextColor, DarktextColor, NavbarTextColor
3. Tell my variables to be one of my root colors or a custom one.
4. Tell my objects to be one of the root-colors or color-variables
So if i change a root color it changes all the variables and the linked objects. And when i only change a variable it only changes the linked objects.
This may be solved with stylesheets or whatever and there are maybe usecases for other similar things like fonts but i primary want that with colors.
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Rikard Eide
commented
A great use case for this would be to change a defined color/style or font. E.g. "Change all instances of Helvetica to Roboto". This is a tedious task right now.
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Kieran Black
commented
Something similar to Craft by InVision. It's a living, breathing style guide that can affect the rest of the document. http://www.invisionapp.com/craft