A year of unDraw for Adobe XD
The world has changed a lot since we started something really cool with Adobe but it’s only been a year. Time to discuss our community and the future…
When we started discussing the possibility of a collaboration with Adobe, back in the summer of 2018, unDraw had a new record with 50k monthly users. It’s been a long way and a year after our first common step, the XD integration, unDraw now has reached 260k monthly users. But there’s a specific part of this community that I want to discuss today, a year after that launch.
Designers
The design community, which has embraced this project with enthusiasm, despite that open-source is not a common practice among us. The love shown was more than we could ever hope for, with 75k installs and being the top and most rated plugin in the XD ecosystem². That’s why I want to talk a bit about this community, that sometimes gets unfairly criticized because of some self-proclaimed “thought leaders”, “prominent members” and “popular artists”, that seek attention. The true creative community that designs accessible and intuitive interfaces and enables everyone, no matter their technical skill use awesome products that change the world. These are the users we found in XD, and it’s been a pleasure collaborating and discussing with you about the future and evolution of the open-source design. Thank you for all the love and enthusiasm!
Adobe
All this, wouldn’t have been possible without the willingness of people¹ in Adobe that made this a reality. Together we have created this integration, had the once-in-a lifetime opportunity to host a Dribbble Play-off with my illustrations, saw Auto-Animate being used outside its scope with amazing results and have launched unDraw’s only exclusive collection with dark-mode illustrations to lead up to Adobe MAX. That’s a lot for a year and we couldn’t have done it without your encouragement and support!
The future
With this successful integration we started something really cool and hope we’ll have the chance to build on that. As I mentioned in Christmas, this will be a defining year for unDraw and we’ve started this process with our completely redesigned and rebuilt web platform. Our main focus is and will remain to empower the creative community further and we’re in the process of deciding the best course of action to achieve that. So it’s time to take unDraw to the next level, a level that this community and user-base deserve, in the best way possible. But more on that soon…
For now, a huge thank you to each one of you for the support, love and encouragement. Proud to be a member of the wonderful and global design community. Stay safe³!
¹ This past year we met some wonderful people in Adobe so I’d like to thank Kerri, Minson, Mike, Sarah, Aiman and Talin! But a special thank you to our main contact in Adobe, Drew Endick who is a super cool human being, despite his attempts to keep us grounded in every chance! :-P
² Among plugins that have received a capable number of ratings (over 10)
³ It’s a really difficult time worldwide with this pandemic, however the world will come out of this. So it’s better not to repeat what the experts suggest and play the wishing game, but instead keep doing our work and staying safe to protect everyone around us and ourselves.
