Elliot Tu from Zeplin interviewed me for their Design-to-Dev community interview series last week. We chatted about working on Figmalion, my new role, collaborating with developers, the future of design-to-dev tools, and how I use AI in my work.

Mizko with a new video comparing the design hand-off process using Figma vs Zeplin.

Interesting talk by Zeplin​’s co-founder and Head of Product Berk Cebi on the evolution of design systems over the last 10 years, the role that design tools play in this process, and the unfortunate disconnect between our design components, code, and documentation. He suggests design tokens may be one of the potential solutions and shows how they can be used to connect the parts of the design system.

Great article by Christine Vallaure on improving accessibility by using relative font sizes in CSS, and how to work around pixel-based sizes in Figma. While I always use a combination of rem and em units, I wasn’t familiar with the 62.5% CSS hack or that units can be switched during hand-off in Zeplin. Very cool!

Zapier announced a new set of features for product teams, including native support for Figma Variants.

Speaking of Zeplin, this is a pretty good overview of how a digital agency ArcTouch uses it together with Figma.

Warren Tobias describes the whole process of developing a proper design system and replacing Sketch, Abstract, and Flinto with Figma. Interestingly, they continued using Zeplin for the handoff process as their development and engineering team is mostly outsourced.

Python scripts for simplifying design review and sharing design work. Scripts download updated screens from Zeplin or/​and Figma to a new folder with the current date.

Tim Benniks looks at how Figma, Zeplin, VS Code, and Storybook can work together to provide a much better experience for developers.

Zeplin redesigned their Figma plugin, improving export experience and solving some of the performance issues.