The short answer
An .xd file is a design made in Adobe XD: one or more artboards (screens, pages or slides) with their shapes, pictures and text. You don’t need XD to look at it. Drop it on this page and Afterboard draws every artboard in your browser, lets you zoom into each one, click any layer to see its size, position, colour and font, and save an artboard as SVG or PNG. It works on Windows, macOS, Linux and Chromebooks, and the file is read on your device: it isn’t uploaded anywhere.
Why you can’t just install XD
Adobe put XD into maintenance mode in 2023. It is no longer sold as a single app, and new users can only get it as part of the full Creative Cloud All Apps plan. If you are a client, a developer or a freelancer who only needs to see a design, that is a lot to pay for a viewer. Figma can’t open .xd files either. That leaves converters that cost per file or per month, uploading the design to someone’s server, or reading it in the browser, which is what this page does.
What you will see
- Every artboard as a picture in a grid, with its name and size in pixels.
- A zoomable view of each artboard, with the layers panel on one side and an inspector on the other: click a button, a heading or a photo to read its exact position, size, fill colour, border, shadow, corner radius and type settings.
- The document’s colours and text styles, the fonts it uses, and every picture embedded in it.
- Components resolved: buttons, cards and other symbols are drawn as they look in the design, not as empty boxes.
About fonts
An XD file names its fonts but doesn’t contain them. If the font is installed on your computer, it is used. If it is an open-source font such as Roboto, Poppins, Montserrat, Open Sans, Lato, Inter or Noto Sans, the page draws it with its own copy. If it is a commercial font such as Helvetica Neue, SF Pro, Segoe UI or Proxima Nova, a close open-source font stands in, and the page tells you exactly which fonts were swapped and for what. Text positions come from the file, so layouts stay in place even when a substitute is a little wider or narrower.
When the file won’t open: cloud documents
Since 2019 XD has saved to Adobe’s cloud by default. A cloud document isn’t a real file on the designer’s computer: what gets sent around is sometimes a link, a tiny pointer file, or a copy made while it was still syncing, and none of those contain the artboards. Afterboard says so instead of showing a blank page. The fix is on the sender’s side: in XD, File › Save As, then choose Local document; or at assets.adobe.com, open Cloud documents, choose the file and download it. An xd.adobe.com share link opens in any browser, but only as a web preview.
Is it safe?
The design never leaves your device. Your browser reads the file, a background worker unpacks it and the page draws it, all locally. You can check this yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, watch the Network tab, then open a file. Nothing is sent.
Need more than viewing?
Viewing everything and saving one artboard at a time as SVG or PNG is free. A one-time £9 unlock adds every artboard to a PDF (one page each), a ZIP of every artboard as SVG and PNG at 1x, 2x and 3x, all embedded images as files, and a handoff sheet with the colours, character styles and all the text as spreadsheets.