Design Systems - Anima Blog

Unleash the power of Material UI with Anima

Yarden Katz — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 11:08:52 +0000

Reading Time: 4 minutes

We’re excited to introduce Anima’s latest feature: the ability to transform any Figma design into clean, functional code using Material UI (MUI). This powerful capability helps developers quickly convert any Figma file—whether it’s well-structured or not—into high-quality MUI code.

The problem: designers mindset vs. developers approach

In the world of digital product creation, designers and developers often have different priorities. Designers focus on creativity and user experience, often without considering the technical constraints or specific libraries used in implementation. Developers, on the other hand, need to translate these designs into code that is functional, maintainable, adhere to best practices, is reusable, and aligns with existing codebases, libraries, and standards.

Anima bridges this gap by enabling developers to stay within the confines of their chosen libraries, like MUI, while still respecting the designer’s creative vision. This ensures a smooth, efficient development process that saves time and resources.

How Anima’s MUI integration works

When you start using Anima’s MUI support, the process is as seamless as it is powerful. Anima detects design elements— even those not explicitly defined in Figma—and generates MUI code that aligns with your project’s needs:

Generating New Assets? Start with MUI: Use the Anima plugin in Figma to create new MUI-based components and screens. This gives you a head start with ready-to-use code that adheres to MUI standards. Just copy and paste your code!
Integrating with an Existing Project? Go Further with Frontier: Take integration to the next level with Anima’s VSCode extension, Frontier. Frontier learns your existing code components, MUI theme provider, and other code conventions. It generates code that reuses these elements and suggests new code when necessary, ensuring seamless integration with your project. With Frontier, you can easily inject new, complex components, customize layouts, and see real-time previews of your changes—all within the VSCode environment.

Whether you’re working with Figma Classic Mode, Dev Mode, or VS Code, Anima reduces development time and eliminates repetitive tasks, making your workflow more efficient and effective.

Anima’s MUI integration: your best starting point

With Anima’s integration with MUI, developers can easily convert Figma designs into functional, readable code. The tool automatically detects design elements—even if they aren’t defined as components in Figma—and generates MUI code that aligns perfectly with your project’s needs.

Simple Example: Button

Consider this basic button design in Figma that isn’t defined as a component:

Here’s how generic tools might translate it:

Here’s how Anima translates it into MUI code:

In this example, Anima

Recognizes the button as a potential component
Generates the appropriate MUI component with the correct props
Adds customization—like corner radius—that integrates seamlessly into your project.

Advanced example: Table

Now, let’s look at a more complex example—a table with multiple subcomponents. This is where Anima’s capabilities really shine, demonstrating its ability to handle advanced MUI components.

Here’s how Anima translates it into MUI code:

This table example shows how Anima automatically handles the structure of a table from Figma, generating the necessary MUI components such as Table, TableHead, TableRow, and TableCell. Anima ensures that each component is used correctly, providing a clean and maintainable codebase.

Best practices: Getting the most out of Anima with MUI

While Anima works well with any Figma design, it performs best when using the official MUI Figma library. Aligning design elements closely with MUI components will result in the highest quality code generation, minimizing manual adjustments and streamlining your workflow.

Future enhancements: Theme generation

Looking ahead, Anima is committed to enhancing its capabilities even further. We plan to introduce support for generating a custom MUI theme provider based on your Figma designs, ensuring consistency across your projects.

Start coding with Anima and MUI today

With Anima’s powerful MUI integration, you can convert any Figma design into high-quality, functional code, no matter how it’s structured. Say goodbye to manual coding and start saving time today. Explore how Anima can transform your development process by trying it with your next project.

The post Unleash the power of Material UI with Anima appeared first on Anima Blog.

The future of design-dev alignment and methodology

Avishay Cohen — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 12:55:29 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I am the CEO and co-founder of Anima, the leading platform for automating design to code with AI.

With over 600K installs, Anima is the #1 tool for developers in the Figma store and was recently named a representative vendor of the design-to-code space by Gartner.

I talked recently about the future of product design and development teams. Here, I put things in writing.

Our thesis around design-dev alignment is straightforward.

The two worlds of product design and development have been moving toward each other rapidly for over a decade. And although the concepts have become increasingly similar, we still have two sources of truth — Design and Code.
Anima is here to automate design-to-code with AI, freeing developers and designers to create and build digital products faster.

Background: Why is UX so important?

Let’s start with the motivation for improving this process of taking user experience to production.

We live in a digital world. Every day, my phone tells me I spent 3–4 hours on the tiny screen. And thank God my laptop doesn’t tell me how much time I spent there because it’s probably 8–12 hours. We work, communicate, and eventually live a significant portion of our lives on the screen.

We experience everything on the screen through the UX of all the software we use — Google, Slack, Zoom, Gmail, Google Docs, IDEs, Figma, any way of non-face-to-face communication today, financials from banking to trading, shopping, ordering food, reading books, reading the news, watching videos, listening to music, trip planning, taking notes. It’s all digital.

For almost any business today, their website and mobile apps are the new storefront. You want to serve your clients, provide value easily, and engage with them in the best possible way.UX is at the core of every business today, and it is how we experience the world. It is crucial.

Past & present: State of Design-Dev alignment

Over the past decade, designers and developers have made huge progress, introducing new tools and methodologies from handoff tools to the concepts of modular components and all the way to design systems.

Shared components and standards are designers’ building blocks

Design handoff — 10 years ago, designers manually created red lines and ‘slices’ and sent them over email or Dropbox. We are now living on the same tools — it started with Zeplin/InVision and now Figma.
Modular components — This concept was brought from code and adopted with love by design tools, starting with Sketch, and quickly became a standard. It allows us both to design smarter with a more modular design with reusable elements and speaks the same language and concepts between design and code.
Atomic design — Once we adopted components, Atomic design allowed us to start thinking about hierarchy and expanding design systems into a smarter foundation for design work.
Design tokens — This is another level of shared communication around repeating values between design & code, from fonts to colors, to corner radius, spacing, etc.

“Design tokens are the building blocks of all UI elements. The same tokens are used in designs, tools, and code.”
– Google’s material design

Component properties — Components have become even more modular and robust with variables and overrides, allowing even more reuse, and again — similar concepts from development brought into the design process.
Component variants — Yet another level of modularity, allowing our components to change their layout, content, and hierarchy to support different states (disabled, hover, error, expanded, mobile vs. desktop).
Responsiveness — Auto-layout, Auto-responsiveness, Pins, Constraints, and other ways to make our design dynamic have made their way to design tools as the standard way to design.

Conclusions from 1000 talks: There is no silver bullet

Talking with a thousand Design system teams over the past year, we learned that the design-development alignment is not a solved problem yet. There is no silver bullet on how to do it perfectly. We are still evolving.

Here’s what we’ve learned from 1,000 talks with design systems teams:

Figma is not fully updated. And code. And Storybook — Having two sources of truth makes it hard to keep up-to-date design with everything in code/production. A lot of maintenance is required, and most teams can’t afford it. 25% Started to adopt Storybook, and less than 40% managed to keep it updated.
Everyone redesigns — 30% are redesigning now, 30% plan to redesign soon, and you cannot redesign if the design files do not reflect your live product.
Multi-layer DS is a thing — Simply put, large companies need a core design system for multiple products/brands and expand it for every product/brand. Making the design system multi-layer.
Open-source as a base — This is a great best practice. Save time on creating the components that every product has — Why reinvent inputs, buttons, and date pickers? Just define your needs first and align on the open source technology with both design and teams. The most popular choices are MUI and Ant, but many alternatives exist.
UX Agencies — This is a fascinating case. UX agencies create and manage or hand off design systems regularly. They live and breathe design systems to the extreme and are specialized in setting them up. Here, the best practice of starting with an open-source or a proprietary base DS is widespread.

The future: The next phase is automation

AI is not here to steal our jobs. I believe it will allow us to design faster, build faster, communicate better, and be on the same page.I see the next phase of evolution in automation. Anima plays a crucial part in this phase of evolution. Anima has over 600k installs on Figma and over 300k on Adobe XD. We have recently partnered with Figma to co-launch #DevMode, where Anima turns design into code right inside Figma.

Near-term predictions

Anima is not alone. We will see more automation around design-ops and development alignment:

Co-pilot design tools — Tools like Diagram will rise and help designers draft new flows based on your Design systems.
Design Systems governance and adoption are classic tasks for AI.
UX copy automation tools will assist in writing, micro-copy feedback, and applying voice and tone across your product.
Tokens automation — Tokens are a great shared language between design and code. Tokens Studio already syncs design and code.
Storybook automation — Storybook is excellent for DS alignment and adoption but is hard to maintain. AI will maintain it for you.
Responsiveness and dynamic layouts (i.e., Auto layout) are incredible but take time. It will be automated, created, and maintained for you.

A lot is coming now that screen-first design tools have matured, with new technologies now available thanks to Genetarive AI.

Where to Go From Here

First, I invite you to follow me & Anima on Twitter/LinkedIn. We’ll be announcing our upcoming releases, all of which are centered around AI-powered, automated design-to-code. A few months ago, we released Frontier, the first AI coding assistant, tailored for frontend development.

The post The future of design-dev alignment and methodology appeared first on Anima Blog.

Design systems: what they are, why you need one, and where to start

Lucas Chae — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 10:39:54 +0000

Reading Time: 7 minutes

If you’re wondering what a design system is and how establishing one can impact your product or organization, you’ve come to the right place.

Digital products are getting larger and more complex to meet soaring demand—and need to be delivered faster than ever for organizations to stay competitive. This means the traditional design-to-development process, where designers build each screen from scratch and developers translate them into code, isn’t fast or consistent enough to build those products at scale.

Design systems solve this problem by creating a single source of truth between design and code—so that designers and developers build products with a shared, defined set of reusable components and standards. Robust design systems can provide a nearly-lossless handoff from design to production with minimal effort from either side. This ensures consistency across complex products and distributed teams, streamlines development, and creates an optimal user experience for your product.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions so you’ll come away with a clear understanding of what a design system is, how you or your organization might benefit from one, and where to start.

What is a design system?
What is included in a design system?
Why use a design system?
1. Advantages
2. Disadvantages
How to create a design system
1. Build from scratch
2. Adapt an open source library
How to manage a design system
1. Manually
2. Automatically

TL;DR

Design systems:

streamline production and improve consistency by giving designers, developers, and teams a shared set of components and standards—one in images and one in code.
consist of component libraries, pattern libraries, style guides, and code documentation.
can be built from scratch or adapted from open-source libraries like MUI, Ant Design, and iOS to make the process more manageable.
require continuous maintenance, updating, and syncing between design and code—which can be expensive for orgs with limited resources.
are increasingly being automated to help smaller orgs reap the benefits with fewer maintenance costs, and larger orgs manage increasingly complex design systems at scale.

What is a design system?

A design system is like a box of Lego blocks for a product team. It’s a synced library of prefabricated components and standards—one in images and one in code—that both designers and engineers can use as a single source of truth. When design and production use the same set of components and standards to build products, they significantly reduce handoff friction while increasing efficiency and consistency.

Instructions from a set of lego blocks

What is included in a design system?

Design systems come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most conventional examples consist of the following elements: component libraries, pattern libraries, and style guides.

We’ll explain each of these elements using examples from three of the most popular design systems—Material UI (Google), Ant Design, and iOS (Apple).

1. Component library

A component library is a collection of all components within a design system—aka the modular building blocks that form the product. When properly synced between design and code, a component library serves as a single source of truth for designers and developers. Although the contents of a component library can vary based on a company’s needs and capacity, it typically includes the following elements:

Components
Component definitions
Component variants (states)
Best practices
Code snippets and documentation

Components

Components are the smallest building blocks in a design system. They include elements like buttons, chips, dividers, and input fields. Designers work with image-based components in tools like Figma and Adobe XD, while developers work with corresponding code-based components in tools like GitHub and Storybook.

Component definitions

Component definitions tell you when to use a particular component. Design systems define every use case for each component to help teams build consistent experiences that work the way users expect. Here’s how MUI defines a button component:

A button component definition from Material UI

Component variants (states)

Variants—also referred to as states—are components that are similar to each other but with minor differences. They’re typically used to represent different styles and states of a base component. For example, a basic button component has primary, secondary, pressed, disabled, and rounded variants, to name a few.

Without variants, component libraries would have to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of unique UI elements. However, variants branch out from basic fundamental components to keep component libraries simple, organized, and easy to maneuver.

Many component libraries provide style guidelines and examples for each variant.

Button component variants from Ant Design

Best practices

While component definitions tell you when to use a component, best practices tell you where and how to use them. Best practices guide you through specific use scenarios with detailed descriptions for consistent implementation.

Button component best practices from Material UI

Code snippets and documentation for developers

Code snippets present actual code for each component in any supported frameworks and languages. Design systems also include API documentation that explains how to modify these code snippets. This helps developers accurately and efficiently implement the style and functionality of the design in the final product.

Code snippet for an Ant Design button component

API documentation for an Ant Design button component

2. Pattern library

Patterns are reusable building blocks made up of smaller components arranged in specific layouts. Cards, for example, are made up of button components, images, and text with defined spacing between elements. There is no universal way to distinguish patterns from components. In fact, they’re often not put in separate categories at all, since they’re really just complex components comprised of more basic ones.

Pattern example: a card layout made up of different MUI components

3. Style guide

A style guide is a comprehensive manual on how to use design system components together to ensure the best user experience. They’re separate from individual component guidelines, and cover things like how to create intuitive component patterns and where to request certain user actions in a flow.

There’s a spectrum of how strict a style guide can be. For example, Apple Human Interface Guidelines provide extremely detailed design patterns and themes, whereas Ant Design is less prescribed. The former will result in a more uniform, proven-to-work user experience, while the latter gives more room to explore, but with greater uncertainty.

Style guide documentation from iOS design system

Why use a design system?

Advantages

The advantages of using a design system can be narrowed down to efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.

Build and scale efficiently

One of the key metrics of product success is the speed of delivery and ability to scale. The option to reuse prefabricated components from a library is an invaluable advantage for both designers and developers. Designing commonly used UI elements becomes a drag-and-drop process for designers, and implementing features becomes a copy-and-paste process with a few tweaks for developers.

Deliver accurately

Designers and developers build products with a shared set of reusable components and standards, so designs don’t get lost in translation. Instead, products look, feel, and function exactly as designers intended with minimal iterations.

Provide consistent user experience

Using a design system ensures a clear and predictable user experience across every product, feature, and touchpoint in an organization. That’s because design systems utilize a uniform visual language for every asset, so users know exactly how to navigate and what to expect—regardless of where they land.

Disadvantages

Design system cost

Like any product, design systems are constantly evolving to meet users’ needs and organizations’ business goals, and building and managing them requires a dedicated team. A design system can have thousands of components and variants to build and manage—which only grows as your product becomes more complex. And while manually syncing those components between design and code is inefficient and prohibitively expensive for leaner organizations, there are a growing number of options that automate the process.

Design systems can constrain creativity

Designers may be less likely to explore new approaches when they’re limited to a design system. This potential downside, however, pales in comparison to the overall benefits of streamlined, scalable product development for organizations. Plus, a robust design system should provide ample flexibility for designers to propose new solutions.

How to create a design system

Build a design system from scratch

Building a design system from scratch is expensive, time-consuming, and typically requires a dedicated team. Designers build all of the image-based components and their variants, and developers turn them into a parallel set of code components. Design system teams also develop a set of standards ensuring components are implemented in a defined, consistent way. Because of the resources involved, building from scratch is typically reserved for large organizations with plenty of human and financial capital.

Adapt an open-source design system

Adapting an open source design system—like Material UI or Ant Design—is a great way to get up and running with a small team or a tight timeline. You can customize open-source components’ colors, typography, and spacing to match your brand and visual language, and have a robust design system with a fraction of the time and resources it takes to build one from scratch. Plus, extensive documentation for developers makes it a breeze to implement the design system in code.

Adapting an existing design system is the best option for lean organizations, as well as more established companies that simply want to move faster.

Pluggable Design System

How to manage a design system

Manual design system management

Design systems are never “done.” They’re constantly evolving as new components and variants are added and old ones are changed. Updating design components and code components manually—and making sure they’re in sync—often requires a dedicated team. It’s expensive and time-consuming, which makes design systems inaccessible to organizations with limited human and financial resources.

As design systems continue to grow in size and complexity, the cost of manually maintaining them will soon outweigh their benefits.

Design system automation

There are an increasing number of tools that automate design system management.

Frontier by Anima automates the integration of design systems into development by directly converting Figma designs into complete, ready-to-use code components. With its Code Injection feature, Frontier identifies existing code, generates missing elements, and injects them into your project along with all necessary files and assets. This process eliminates the need for manual copying and pasting, ensuring a seamless and efficient design-to-code workflow, and maintaining consistency across your project.

Get the benefits of a robust design system—without the costs

Signup with Anima

The post Design systems: what they are, why you need one, and where to start appeared first on Anima Blog.

8 design system tools for any organization

Will Brett — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 14:16:29 +0000

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you’re looking for design system tools that’ll help maximize your design system’s impact and minimize the effort involved, you’ve come to the right place.

Design systems can help you build and scale your product quickly and cost-effectively. They dramatically increase consistency and reduce redundancy by giving designers and developers a shared set of pre-made UI components, styles, and elements to use across products and features.

Design systems are also challenging to build, maintain, and evangelize across tools and teams—which can outweigh their benefits.

We compiled this list of design system tools to help you overcome these obstacles and select the right solution for your product, your organization, and your existing tech stack. Explore them all, or click the links below to jump to the tool of your choice.

Storybook
Figma
Anima
Adobe XD
Zeroheight
Knapsack
Invision DSM
Sketch libraries

How to build a design system quickly and easily using MUI components

The problem with design systems

Constant evolution

You don’t just build a design system. It requires continuous collaboration and resources from multiple teams. And since a design system is constantly evolving, it needs to be continuously reviewed and updated to ensure there is no inconsistency between design and production.

Two sources of truth

A frequent issue for many teams and organizations is that they have two sources of truth: the design library and the production code. When design and code components have inconsistencies, this results in drift between what is designed and what is developed. Maintaining two sources of truth is twice the work.

Manual management

Building and managing a design system manually—as most organizations do—is a huge drain on resources. It means either dedicating an entire team, which is expensive, or tapping existing design and development resources, which spreads designers and developers thin. In most cases, both options are a no-go for startups and smaller organizations with limited human and financial capital—but tools that automate some or all of the process are beginning to change that.

8 design system tools for organizations

Here’s a list of the leading tools for building, managing, and maintaining your design system. Some are design-focused, some are development-focused, and the remainder are complete solutions that aim to bridge the gap between design and development.

Storybook

Storybook is a free open-source frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. Thousands of teams use it for UI development, testing, and design system documentation. Predominantly aimed at developers, Storybook helps you develop hard-to-reach states and edge cases without needing to run the whole app.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Developers
Product managers and teams

Features

Build UI pages and components in isolation
Mock hard-to-reach edge cases
Ability to use finished UI components in your apps

Syncing capabilities

No built-in syncing with design tools
Official Figma plugin only lets you compare Storybook and Figma components side-by-side
An addon from Anima enables automatic, continuous syncing with Figma

Integrations

Storybook has over 400 integrations available, so you can connect with most tools your team is already using.

Figma

Figma is an application predominantly aimed at designers to craft and create industry-leading interfaces with greater efficiency. Figma is rich in tools for collaboration enabling multiple people to explore ideas together in real-time, from FigJam whiteboarding sessions through to complex hi-fidelity designs, prototypes, and everything in between.

Figma allows you to create variable components that can be reused throughout your designs. You can also turn a Figma file into a library from which other teams across your organization can access the same components. Creating a shared design component library helps distributed teams stay consistent and speeds up workflows by reducing redundancy. It also makes sharing updates from your codebase in one go instead of updating a bunch of isolated libraries individually.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Designers
Product managers and teams

Features

Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
Everything in one place: Shareable assets, variable components, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

No way to sync design and production components out of the box
Storybook plugin allows side-by-side comparison between components
Code Connect will require manual matching between components and code

Integrations

Figma offers many integrations with other tools to help create a seamless design workflow, including user testing, developer handoff, collaboration and productivity, and more.

Frontier by Anima

Frontier by Anima is a design-to-code platform that’s changing the way teams build frontend—by automating it. Unlike general coding assistants like Copilot, Frontier is specifically tailored to the challenges of creating user interfaces.

It ensures that the code it generates aligns with the original styles and conventions, making it easy to reuse components. This focus makes Frontier an invaluable tool for developers seeking to streamline their workflow and improve the quality of their frontend code.

Who it’s for

Frontend developers
Full-stack developers
Both small & big dev teams

Features

Minimize manual coding by transforming Figma designs into React code effortlessly.
Component Reuse and Integration: Automatically identify and reuse existing components, integrating them smoothly into new projects while maintaining architectural consistency.
Coding Style Adherence: Preserve your coding style, including naming and styling conventions, to ensure the generated code integrates seamlessly into your project.
Design System Friendly: Leverage any library to maintain consistency and accelerate development. Easily convert Figma to code, based on open-source frameworks or your existing codebase.

Syncing capabilities

Automating matching of Figma components to code directly in VSCode
Unlike traditional tools that are tied to a specific design system, Frontier supports a “pluggable design system” approach, allowing it to work with various popular frameworks like MUI, Ant Design, TailwindCSS, and Radix-based libraries. It automatically scans your existing project, identifies and matches local and external components with their design counterparts, and adapts to different naming conventions and structures between Figma designs and code components.

Integrations

Frontier by Anima integrates with the design system tools teams already use (VScode, Figma) so that you don’t need to reinvent your tech stack. In a few clicks, you can automate syncing between the two, eliminating the need for constant, expensive manual updates. Plus, Anima integrates with a range of resources teams already use—from open-source libraries to serverless hosting and CMS platforms.

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is a vector-based design tool specifically created to empower designers to create the latest and greatest websites, apps, and other digital products. You can build a library of styles and components to build the design portion of the design system with Adobe XD. These styles and components can then be used throughout your XD design files.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Designers

Features

Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
Everything in one place—shareable assets, variants, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

Adobe XD has no built-in solution to sync design with code

Integrations

Adobe XD uses plugins to integrate with other tools in your team’s toolkit. You can easily add plugins through the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app. Adobe XD can be used standalone or as part of the bigger Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps.

Zeroheight

Zeroheight is a tool created to connect everyone working with your design system—engineers, designers, product, and marketing teams. Zeroheight works with a range of tools, including Figma and Storybook, enabling you to centralize documentation from each in a single place.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Developers
Designers
Product managers and teams

Features

Integrates seamlessly with the leading design and documentation tools
Interact with Storybook components and code examples
Easy collaboration across teams and functions
Share internally and externally
Add documentation for all tools in one place

Syncing capabilities

Syncs with many of the most popular design system tools, but doesn’t sync between them
You can sync your Figma styles and Storybook code to the platform, but only for documentation
No direct, automated syncing between design libraries and your codebase
Can help guide and streamline manual syncing

Integrations

Zeroheight integrates with Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Storybook, and Abstract.

Knapsack

Knapsack is a design system platform that provides end-to-end infrastructure as well as collaborative tooling that empowers teams to connect their design decisions to developed experiences. This allows organizations to scale their digital products more easily, and increases adoption and collaboration.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Developers
Designers
UX writers
Product managers and teams

Features

Git-backed version control
Third-party embeds from popular tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, and more
Playground for exploring patterns and themes
Feedback and approval capabilities
Automatic updates to tokens and components in docs
Easily created patterns from existing components

Syncing capabilities

No automated solution for keeping design and code in sync
Manual updates are still required

Integrations

Knapsack integrates with Figma, Adobe XD, Abstract, and Framer Cloud.

Invision DSM

Invision Design System Manager (DSM) is Invision’s take on the design system that adds another solution to their growing suite of tools. The Invision design system is aimed more at designers and uses Invision’s Craft plugin to sync designs from Sketch and Figma. You can then use Invision inspect to view code snippets. You can also use Invision DSM to preview stories from Storybook.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Designers
Developers
Product managers and teams

Features

Use the Invision Craft plugin to sync designs from Figma and Sketch to DSM
Preview stories from Storybook
Invision DSM can be used seamlessly with the other Invision products
Component search
Component drag and drop
Version history

Syncing capabilities

Invision DSM can’t sync code with design directly, but is a great tool for documentation and comparison.

Integrations

Invision DSM integrates with Figma, Sketch, and Storybook

Sketch Libraries

Sketch Libraries are Sketch documents where you can centralize components and key elements in your design system. This includes variants, styles, icons, fonts, colors, artboard templates, and more. The libraries can be used by all of your other sketch documents and shared across teams, but need to be updated manually to keep them synced with the codebase.

Who it’s for

Startups
Organizations
Designers

Features

Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
Everything in one place—shareable assets, variable components, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

Sketch doesn’t have any built-in features for syncing design libraries with production code.

Integrations

Sketch has an extensive list of integrations enabling you and your team to utilize your design system in Sketch, assuming your libraries are kept up-to-date. Most of these integrations focus on documentation, handoff, user testing, and prototyping.

What are the best design system tools for startups & small organizations?

For startups and organizations with limited resources, the best design system software is one that your team can manage. Ideally, it’s a combination of tools that reduces or eliminates the amount of manual management required—because manual management is too expensive for most lean organizations.

If you have a design library in Figma and code components in Storybook, you can sync them continuously using Anima. Anima automates the creation and maintenance of a single source of truth between design and code—making the benefits of a design system accessible to all.

In a nutshell

Building a design system is no small feat. It takes a lot of hard work and requires design and engineering to come together. Keeping your design and code in sync is a never-ending task involving a lot of manual labor and frequent cross-checking of styles and components. An out-of-sync design system can cause many discrepancies between your design and code.

The best design system management tool for you depends on your budget, team size, and desired feature set. But one thing’s certain: if you’re running lean and can’t dedicate an entire team to manual design system management, automation is your friend.

Platforms like Anima can help you keep design and production in continuous sync—without changing your stack—and eliminate the need for costly manual updates. That means startups and small organizations with limited resources can actually reap the benefits of a design system, allowing them to spend less, move faster, and scale more efficiently.

Automate design system management with Anima

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How to turn MUI code components into a native Figma library

Satjaleen Madan — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 13:10:39 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutes

As a Senior Product Designer, it’s a huge challenge to keep Figma components up-to-date with code components. And when Figma and code are out of sync, we lose the main benefits of a shared design system: speed, consistency, and scalability.

Thankfully, there’s a solution

Anima now converts Storybook code components into native Figma components automatically, translating everything in the code into Figma parameters. That means:

Code props become Figma variants
Responsive CSS converts to Figma Auto Layout, and
Design tokens translate to Figma styles

And since Anima continuously syncs code updates to Figma, I know I’m always working with the latest version of each component. This is a complete game changer when collaborating with developers to deliver digital products, and with design systems that are increasingly complex, dynamic, and difficult to maintain.

In this article, I’ll demonstrate Anima’s Design System Automation solution using MUI code components from Storybook. You can do the same with your own design system components—or any open source design system—as long as it’s documented in Storybook.

Further reading: How I built a branded design system in Figma using MUI components

How to turn Storybook components into native Figma components

1. Run the Anima plugin in Figma

First, start by installing Anima’s plugin from your Figma file. Remember to log into Anima, select the ‘Manage Design Systems’ section in the plugin:

The Anima plugin welcome screen: Turn Design to Code or Manage Design Systems

Then click ‘Try with our Storybook sample’:

Connecting Anima's Storybook sample allows you to explore the features of the integration without your own Storybook

Once clicked, you’ll be redirected to Storybook on your browser.

2. Explore components in Storybook

Storybook is a playground for front-end UI components, so you’ll be able to play around with the variants and settings of every component, and interact with a visual representation of exactly what’s in the code. This helps you visualize the components exactly as your user will experience them in production.

Switch between different code properties in Storybook for an accurate visual representation of each component and its variants in production

3. Import components to Figma

In Storybook, click on the Anima add-on to trigger the import. Notice that each control you play with represents a property in the code. Anima turns these properties into Figma components with variants, like different alert variants, button states, or card component cases—and maps the exact same properties into Figma’s native control panel.

Next, return to Figma and paste your Figma file’s link in the Anima plugin to connect it to your selected Storybook:

It's easy to connect your Figma file to Storybook for continuous syncing

Once you’ve synced Figma to Storybook, click ‘Start generating components’:

And watch the components you viewed in Storybook generate in Figma automatically:

Storybook code components from MUI's design system generating automatically in Figma

Here’s the MUI alert component and its variants imported into Figma:

Anima imported this MUI alert component and its variants from Storybook into Figma

And here’s a MUI button component with all of its coded variants I imported from Storybook:

A MUI button component and its variants imported from Storybook into Figma using Anima

4. Customize the components in Figma

I find it really easy and efficient to play around with the imported components and switch between variants in Figma.

Once a component is generated from Storybook, I can easily grab an instance, adjust the Figma properties, and edit it as I wish using Figma’s native control panel.

I can also apply customizations—like tweaking the text, resizing, and changing colors as I normally would. And just as Anima converts design tokens into Figma styles, it also goes the other way: designers can change styles in Figma and automatically generate updated design tokens for developers.

Switching between variants defined in the code using Figma's native control panel

5. Hand your design off

Anima’s Design System Automation solution makes handoff a breeze. Along with the design, developers can access code snippets and storybook links for every design system component in the flow—right from Figma’s Inspect Panel. And since Anima maintains all of the naming conventions from the code in Figma, developers always know exactly which components and props to implement.

A button component generated by Anima in Figma, with corresponding code snippets, properties, and Storybook links visible in Figma's Inspect Panel

And that’s it! We now have a Figma Library that’s continuously synced with production so we can easily grab, tweak, and design with the exact same components developers will use to build the product. This single source of truth will help designers like me create and deploy designs faster, with perfect fidelity, minimal iterations, and zero friction during handoff. It’ll even allow for rapid prototyping with interactive production components.

It’s safe to say this will change the way teams build, manage, and scale design systems—and make them sustainable at the current pace of innovation. All in all this Storybook integration will make it easier for designers and developers to deliver better products more consistently and efficiently together.

Your Figma library won’t sync itself. Unless you’re using Anima.

The post How to turn MUI code components into a native Figma library appeared first on Anima Blog.

Pluggable design system – Figma to your design system code

Ofer LaOr — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 14:35:35 +0000

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Design to code is a difficult problem to crack, there are so many variations to consider. On the Figma side, we have to consider auto layouts, design tokens, component sets, instances and Figma variables. On the code side, we have to assume that the codebase could contain both local and external components that could come from anywhere.

That’s why, when we created Frontier, we didn’t want to stick to just one coding design system. MUI, for example, is a very popular React Design System, but it’s one of many design systems that are rising and falling. Ant Design is still extremely popular, as is the TailwindCSS library. We’re seeing the rapid rise of Radix-based component libraries like ShadCN as are Chakra and NextUI. However, we knew that if we wanted to reach a wide audience we could not rely on a limited subset of Design Systems, we had to create a “pluggable design system”.

Key Challenges in Implementing a Pluggable Design System

There are a few challenges to accomplishing this:

1. Existing Project Integration:
  
  You have an existing project that already uses a design system. In this case, we are expected to scan the codebase, and understand and reuse the design system. We do this when Frontier starts, it looks through your codebase for local and external components (you can restrict where it actually scans and also control how deeply it looks at the code) for your code components and usages of those code components.
2. Design and Code Component Mismatch:
  
  When we look at the Figma design, we don’t assume that the designer has a clear understanding of which component system will be utilized to implement the design. Typically, if this is an Enterprise with a Design System Team, the components in the design will match in design. Still, not necessarily in their name, variants nor have a 1:1 match between the Figma and code component counterparts. In fact, the same design could be used with different Design Systems code components and fully expected to match and work.
3. Flexible Implementation:
  
  Once applied, components could have multiple ways to implement overrides and children:
  1. Props / variants
  2. Component children
  3. Named slots
4. The “Cold start” problem
  
  Even if you solve scanning the project’s repo, what happens when you encounter a brand new project and want to use a new library with it? In this case, you would have zero code usage examples and zero components that you are aware of…

To overcome these problems we started with a few assumptions:

1. Leverage Usage Examples:
  
  the project has a robust set of usage examples, we can take inspiration from them and understand how this particular project utilizes those components, which will help us solve the prop/overrides/children/named-slots issue.
2. Custom Matching Model
  
  We had to create a custom model that understands how designers in design systems implement their components and how developers code the code components. This matching model was trained on a large set of open source Design System repos and open Figma design systems. It reached a surprisingly high matching rate on all our tests. Looks like many designers and many developers think in similar ways despite using very different conventions and actual designs.
3. Cross-System Matching
  
  Once we were able to match within the same design system, the next challenge was to make the model more robust with matching across design systems – take a design that relies on AntD components and train the model to implement it using MUI components, or vice versa. This made the model much more versatile.
4. Local Storage for Privacy and Security
  
  For security and privacy purposes, we have to encode and store our RAG embeddings database locally, on the user’s machine. This allows us to perform much of the work locally without having to send the user’s code to the cloud for processing.

Interestingly, the fact that we can store bits and pieces of this databases, also opens up possibilities with cold starts. An empty project can now easily state that it wants to use MUI and simply download and use the embeddings. That gives the usage LLMs all the context that’s needed to produce much more robust results, even when the codebase is completely empty from any actual context.

The result is that Frontier can now generate code components in projects, even if the Design System doesn’t actually match the code design library and even when the codebase is completely devoid of any actual examples.

The post Pluggable design system – Figma to your design system code appeared first on Anima Blog.

How to sync your Storybook design system into Figma

Nikola Duza — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 07:58:40 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutes

We’re excited to announce Design System Automation by Anima, which automatically turns your Storybook into a native Figma library, then keeps it continuously synced with any code updates. The generated Figma components include variants, Auto Layout parameters, Figma Styles, and actual code from Storybook.

Designers can build flows with the same components developers will use to build the product. Developers get designs containing the exact components they have in the code, along with names, props, Storybook links, and their own code references. That makes handoff and implementation a breeze.

Anima’s Design System Automation solution gives teams consistent, lightning-fast builds, perfect fidelity, and zero friction between design and development.

In this article, we’ll demonstrate:

How to connect Storybook to Figma using Anima
How to generate a Figma library from your design system code components, and
How Anima keeps Figma continuously synced with production.

Let’s get to it!

Step 1. Connect Storybook and Figma using Anima’s integration

First off, you will need to download the Anima plugin for Figma. Once you have it installed in Figma, go ahead and open the Anima plugin.

1. To start syncing Storybook and Figma, you will need to install the Anima CLI. For this example, we’ll use LeafyGreen—MongoDB’s design system in Storybook —and install the Anima CLI there. You can install the CLI inside your own project with the following commands:

yarn add -D anima-storybook-cli

Or, if you’re using `npm`, like so:

npm install –save-dev anima-storybook-cli

2. Once the Anima CLI is installed, we need to generate a Storybook build. In the showcase project, we are doing it with this command:

yarn build-storybook

Now that the Storybook is built, we can sync it with Anima and Figma using the Anima CLI and the token we got in the Anima Figma plugin. To sync Storybook and Figma, run the following command:

yarn anima-storybook sync -t YOUR_TOKEN

The `anima-storybook` will prepare and sync files to your Figma project and report when it finishes. The important thing here is to pass the token from the Anima Figma plugin.

3. Once the sync is finished, go to Figma and the Anima plugin will show the following prompt:

4. Then, click “Start generating components”:

After some time, Anima will wire up the Storybook and Figma and allow you to generate Figma components from Storybook.

Step 2. Generate Figma components from Storybook code

Now that the Storybook and Figma are synced via Anima’s CLI, we can generate any Storybook component right from Figma. Unimported Storybook components will appear in the Anima plugin like so:

We’ll start by expanding the carousel of unimported components and searching for ‘Button’:

Then, we’ll select the Button variants we wish to import. In this case, ‘Button’ has a lot of props, and Anima can identify and generate every possible combination as a unique variant in Figma:

When the import is finished in the plugin, we can go ahead and click “Generate” next to the Button component:

And Anima will start generating variants of the Button right in Figma:

Once complete, the Button will appear as synced and we can go ahead and preview the generated Figma components by either clicking the four dots in the plugin or navigating to the “Components/Button” page in Figma:

Anima will generate a separate page in Figma with all of the Button component variants, as demonstrated below:

We can switch between the Button’s variants using Figma’s native control panel:

What’s also great is that you can preview the code you’ll implement directly from Figma’s inspect panel. The code includes the updated props, and the naming conventions are identical to those used in Storybook:

Also, whenever you import a component that includes a button, Anima will recognize it as a subcomponent so you can edit that instance alone:

This is definitely a game-changer when it comes to bridging the gap between designers and developers. But what happens when the Button changes in the code?

In the next section, we’ll demonstrate how Anima automatically syncs Storybook code updates to Figma.

Step 3. Sync Storybook and Figma

So we changed some logic inside the Button component in the code, but how do we ensure those updates are synced in Figma? First, we need to rebuild the Storybook with:

yarn build-storybook

Next, we need to sync Storybook to Figma again using Anima’s CLI:

yarn anima-storybook sync -t YOUR_TOKEN

Once we’ve synced, the Anima plugin in Figma will notify us that we have some unsynced changes to our component library:

All we need to do is click “Update,” and Anima will sync the changes to the existing Button:

Once the changes are synced, we can see that the Button element has a change reflected. I added a letter “A” to be rendered in every button, which can be clearly seen in each variant below:

And that’s it. You can incorporate the `yarn anima-storybook sync‘ command somewhere in your continuous integration (CI) workflow so that changes are synced, for example, whenever code is pushed to the main branch of your project. This will ease the handoff process, accelerate frontend builds, and allow developers to focus on logic and backend architecture. If you have a complex, dynamic design system, this is a great solution for keeping designers aligned with production.

Get designs built with your production components. Every time.
Try it now

The post How to sync your Storybook design system into Figma appeared first on Anima Blog.

Use live Storybook components in your Figma prototypes

Lucas Chae — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 16:22:37 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutes

One of the biggest challenges for product teams working with design systems is ensuring that all components across all workspaces are consistent with the ones used in production.

With Anima, you no longer have to worry. Anima automatically syncs your Figma components with your code components in Storybook, including variants, Auto Layout, and Figma Styles. It protects and ensures a single source of truth at the code level and keeps all components continuously up-to-date in Figma.

And since Anima renders your actual component code in its Live Preview, you can design and share an interactive, responsive prototype that’s 1:1 with production—without a developer. In this article, we’ll show you how it works in 3 simple steps.

Step 1. Import your code components into Figma and build a prototype

Here’s how you can easily import your code components into Figma and use them to build interactive, responsive prototypes without a developer. To demonstrate this, we’ll create a sample form based on this wireframe:

A simple form wireframe

We will be building our form using components from the Supabase design system in Storybook, but you can just as easily use your own coded design system or any other open-source design system available on Storybook.

Let’s head over to Supabase’s Storybook:

Supabase's open source design system in Storybook

Here, we’ll explore and choose components that suit our needs for our sample project. For our form wireframe, we’ll narrow down the required components to Data Inputs (With Reveal and Copy, Text Area, ListBox, Upload, Radio) and generate them in Figma automatically.

Anima automatically generates a Figma library from Storybook code components

Now, let’s take a closer look at one of the Figma components Anima generated from code.

For this alert component, you can see in the control panel that Anima turned its props into Figma variants and responsive CSS into Figma Auto Layout. Anima also translated its design tokens to Figma’s Local Styles.

Anima converts code props to Figma variants, responsive CSS to Auto Layout, and design tokens to Figma Styles

Once we’ve confirmed our components were properly imported, we’re ready to create our first design.

Using the newly synced components in the Figma library, we can easily build our form prototype. It’s a simple yet fully functional form with just 5 components from the assets. Did I mention these components are synced in real-time with our coded components in Storybook?!

A form built with live production components in Figma

Step 2. Preview your interactive prototype

Anima allows you to transform your Figma project into a live preview or prototype that’s rendered from your actual production code. You first need to launch and sign into Anima’s plugin for Figma, and choose “Turn Design to Code” option.

Anima plugin's opening screen

Next, select the frame you would like to preview (in our case, our sample form), and click on the “Preview” button.

Preview your interactive prototype right from Anima's plugin for Figma

In the live preview, all of your components will look and behave exactly as they will in production since they’re rendered with your actual source code. For example, you can click on the dropdown menu and choose different options exactly like you can in Storybook—or in the final product.

This dropdown menu rendered from Supabase's code is fully functional

The component behavior in Storybook is precisely reproduced in Figma

If you want to change your design, all you need to do is exit the preview, make updates, and return to the preview again. You’ll see that all the changes are instantly reflected there.

Step 3. Share your interactive prototype

Once you’ve settled on your design and confirmed that it’ll be accurately reflected in production, you can easily share your prototype by syncing it with Anima’s web app. First, click on the “sync” button at the bottom of the Anima Plugin:

Syncing a Figma design to Anima's web app

You’ll be asked to choose a project to sync with. You can choose an existing project or create a new one to complete syncing.

Setting up an Anima project from the plugin in Figma

When you open your project in Anima’s web app, you can see that all components are fully interactive, just like they were in the Figma preview. That’s because each component is rendered from Supabase’s actual code.

A live prototype built with Figma + Anima using code components from Supabase's Storybook

Finally, when you’re happy with your design, you can share a public link to your web-based prototype. Connect your own domain in a few simple steps, or use Anima’s generated sub-domain. Here’s the prototype link I created.

Anima makes it easy to share a live, public link to your prototype

Get better demos, more valuable user tests, and perfect fidelity from every prototype.
Try it now for free

The post Use live Storybook components in your Figma prototypes appeared first on Anima Blog.