I dream of the day where I design an interface using systematic logic and never again have to push individual objects around different sized artboards. The day I dream of gets nearer and 2016 was an incredible year for adaptive design.

I thought I’d take some time to sample a few popular design tools to compare where they are at with their adaptive layout features.

Why Adaptive Design?

When the original iPhone apps were designed there was one screen size to design for. These days, there are six different iOS screen sizes with two orientations for each. If you want to support multi-tasking on the iPad, you can add four more layouts into the mix for a total of 16 different possible layouts for your view. Designing for Android has always been like this due to the variation of devices.

Developers needed a better way to build adaptive layouts since the process of hard-coding static values for different views wasn’t scalable or practical. Tools like Interface Builder’s Auto Layout in Xcode were developed to help easily program the layout constraints when adapting to different layouts.