Dev Mode moved out of beta last week, and in this article, the Figma team talks about their product philosophy, how they’re improving the experience for developers and designers, and what’s coming next. There are new features that bring design and code closer together, including annotations in Dev Mode, along with improvements to compare changes, plugins, and the Figma for VS Code extension.
How it started: “We needed a team that lived and breathed development like we did design, so in 2021, we acquired Visly — a team of eight designers and engineers who built a tool for developing UI components in React. […] The Visly team brought with them years of hands-on experience and months of research on developer tooling — in other words, they had the developer “intuition” we were looking for.”
How it’s going: “Dev Mode aims to make you more productive by connecting the tools you use and your code components to the design file. There’s no one way to work, which is why we built Dev Mode to adapt to a variety of tools, processes, and workflows. Whether you’re looking to link design and code with Storybook, ensure accessibility with Stark, or streamline project management with Jira, Linear, and GitHub, plugins allow you to extend Figma’s functionality to flex however your team works.”