Adobe Edge Reflow

» see html.adobe.com/edge/reflow as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

edge reflow was a tool i opened twice. by 2013 i had a chrome window with the responsive device toolbar on the right and a text editor on the left, and the idea of buying a creative cloud sub to draw breakpoints on a canvas did not match how i wanted to work. reflow shipped as a public preview in april 2013 next to edge animate and edge code, with the same edge brand and the same creative cloud download path. it stayed in preview until the day it was retired.

the pitch was that a designer could lay out a page once on a wide canvas, then drag a slider down to a tablet width, watch the layout break, and adjust the breakpoint visually with a generated css media query underneath. exporting to html and css was the second half of the demo. for a print designer learning the responsive web for the first time, the workflow read as intuitive. for a front-end engineer writing the css directly, the generated output was a starting point you would mostly rewrite.

the death announcement landed on the adobe help center on 31 august 2015 inside the edge family end-of-development post. development on reflow had stopped earlier in the year and the public preview was being closed. cc subscribers got a notice that the responsive design work would continue in a new product that adobe was building under the project name comet, which shipped in 2016 as adobe xd. reflow itself was pulled from the cc download page across 2018 and 2019 with the rest of the edge family.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

responsive web design in 2012 to 2013 was still a vocabulary the web team was learning. ethan marcotte's a list apart article from 2010 had moved into a book in 2011, agencies had started budgeting for separate mobile builds, and the visual design crowd was working out what a comp looked like for a layout that could be six different widths on six different devices. reflow tried to be the new comp tool for that world.

the timing problem was that sketch from the small bohemian coding studio in the hague shipped in september 2010 and hit a serious 2.0 build in 2012, around the same window adobe was prepping reflow. sketch was a mac-only product priced as a one-time purchase, and the design community moved fast. by 2014 the agency designers who would have been the reflow audience were already deep on sketch with a plugin ecosystem and a known artboard workflow.

~ the long tail ~

the canvas-with-breakpoints idea did not die with reflow. webflow, which had been a y combinator company since 2013, kept building on the same general shape and grew into a real business as a designer-friendly no-code site builder by the end of the 2010s. figma launched in 2016 with multiplayer artboards and took over from sketch as the default design tool over the next five years. adobe xd shipped in 2016 with auto-animate and prototype linking and lived on as the official responsive-design path inside creative cloud until adobe stopped active development on xd in 2024 too.

reflow ended up as a small step on a longer road. the basic visual-breakpoint metaphor it tried to introduce is now part of the default ui in every modern design tool, the css media query is no longer the thing the designer has to think about manually, and the public preview build adobe shipped between 2013 and 2015 is now a creative cloud archive entry no one downloads.

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