Adobe is on a mission to make life easier for designers, and its latest undertaking on that front is something it calls Project Comet. The software-turned-creative-app company debuted it at this week’s annual Adobe MAX Conference, and from what we can tell, it looks like a godsend for UX designers.
It’s early days for Project Comet, which will roll out in 2016, but it’s essentially a website- and app-building tool with WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) capabilities, so that designers can glide between wireframing, working on interface design, and prototyping, all in one digital place. Right now, that's not what they're doing. According to a survey conducted by Khoi Vinh, a principal designer at Adobe, designers currently use an array of programs. For wireframing, they tend to use Sketch by Bohemian Coding or Illustrator. For prototyping, HTML/CSS dominates. This means Project Comet, if it works as promised, has the potential to solve some longstanding workflow issues in web design. As Vinh explains on his blog:
Adobe's answer is Repeat Grid, a feature built into Project Comet that lets designers create one set of elements—like a text and image box—and then copy it again and again, as needed. This condenses some of the repetitive and time-consuming work needed to build any basic site or app, freeing designers to experiment more, iterate more, and create more.