Search & enhancements to Menus

Search

Search is an entirely new content element that can be added anywhere in your project and styled to match your brand. Each search element will index all content from the pages of your guidelines project by default, and includes simple filters allowing you to further limit what’s displayed when searching. This is a highly flexible approach that lets you not only refine how your brand resources are accessed, but also define how they look within a visual search interface.

For more information on search, see our guide.

Updates to menus

Alongside the search element comes a host of updates to menus in standards. For starters, you can now add multiple menus. Add search to your existing menus, or quickly add an entirely new menu dedicated to the search function. Further more, to improve the experience of designing search or navigation menus, we’ve refactored our outlines to include many more options, which will hopefully get you closer to a finished design from the start. That said, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with multiple menus, and we’re excited to see how they’re implemented.

For more information regarding menus, see our guide.

State editor

As a highly interactive element, search has many states to design for. To better support the editing experience, we’ve developed a completely new state view that allows you to see all states of your element in one place. You can access this view from either the contextual toolbar, or the state settings group from the sidebar. This interface should make the states of interactive elements more accessible while designing, and feel more intuitive than our previous system.

For more information about editing states, see our guide.

More new features

AI assistance

We’ve also launched a small suite of AI powered quality of life updates to this release. The most notable feature is a chat-based assistant that can answer questions and help troubleshoot simple issues when working in Standards. Additionally, we’ve added generative AI functionality to assist with accessibility by automatically writing metadata such as layer names and descriptions on demand.

New ways to add pages

We’ve made it significantly easier to create new pages in standards by providing two new methods to build from an outline instead of starting from scratch. Similar to our setup experience, you can now add entire pages with automated sections for common topics such as logo, typography, color, etc. Additionally, you can create new pages using any existing page design as a starting point. Adding from an existing page can be done within the same project, or from any project in your workspaces.

Gradients & new color defaults

Standards now offers native support for color gradients on background fills. These offer familiar controls for linear, radial, and angular gradient types. Finally, we’ve added two new default colors, button background and button text, that can be defined from your project settings. New elements such as Button, Dropdowns, and Search will use these color values by default and can be changed globally from a single setting.