Hi there. I lead the team that worked on this project. Someone who runs this site brought this post to my attention.

I was a little bummed at the negativity here but the confusion I can understand. The Behance post focuses on the work itself and admittedly doesn't do much to explain our organization. We've been asked to do an AMA on here at some point in the near future, so I'm just going to offer this one post to clear up the broad points and will save further responses for later.

Adobe XD (Experience Design) is/was a global design organization that's been around for more than a decade. There are about 160 of us and we work on nearly every Adobe product and service (of which there are more than 100, if you can believe it). This work crosses Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Document Cloud, and is absolutely massive in scope.

A few years ago, we were heavily involved in creating a product that was then called "Project Comet". When that project was mature enough to release as a beta, our Brand Strategy team thought long and hard about what to call it and, in the end, decided that "Experience Design" was the best name for that product since that’s precisely what it’s intended use is.

As you can imagine, that led to some confusion here. When someone talked about the "XD Team" it was no longer clear who they were referring to. Adobe is a company of around 15,000 people, so it’s extremely important that our organization be easy to talk about. Though we liked XD as a name and had a strong emotional investment in it, it was no longer functioning the way we needed it to.

Beyond that, most of our friends working in large centralized design organizations at companies like Google, Facebook, and the like were simply calling themselves “[Company] Design” and we decided it made sense to follow suit. This also simplifies things from a recruiting and outreach perspective within our community.

The project on Behance is meant as a simple process document to show how we went about creating a new visual identity for ourselves as we moved from being called XD to Adobe Design. We wanted to focus on the design process itself and not the underlying business reasons why we needed to do it, since people mostly go to Behance to see beautiful things not read about the strategy behind it.

Most of the work was done by one designer, Anny Chen, over the course of a few months. I manage this team along with a few others and helped with some creative direction as did the other two designers who are credited on the project. We had regular formal and informal critiques throughout the process and helped steer a little bit, but Anny worked the process and got this result.

I hope this clears up some of the background on who we are and what this project was about. Thank you for your interest.