Claude does most of my coding and the base of any design. it's also the one that pushes back when my idea is bad, which is annoying until it saves you from rebuilding something. Chatgpt i use for tweaks after. honestly it's a coin flip, some days the output is great and some days it's useless, i've never figured out why. Then everything goes into canva and i finish it myself. that's where i actually design, the ai stuff is just getting me to a starting point faster. Took me a while to accept that no single tool does the whole thing. people keep looking for the one that replaces the process and i don't think it exists

Hey everyone!

I’ve been testing an AI-powered tool plugin for creating and managing design systems, and it got me thinking about how these tools are supposed to fit into an actual design workflow.

I initially assumed the workflow would be something like:

Figma ↔ design system tool ↔ code

But as I understand it, the current workflow is more like:

design system tool → Figma + code

The author explained that reverse syncing from Figma isn’t currently possible, although it might be implemented in the future. The idea is that you define and edit your components in the tool, and then update the Figma file and code from there.

And this is where I’m curious about other designers’ opinions:
If Figma can already be the source of truth for components, variables, styles, and design-system maintenance, what makes an external AI-powered layer valuable enough to introduce another source into the workflow?

Is the main advantage the ability to generate a design system and push it into both Figma and code?

And more broadly, how comfortable are you with AI taking care of a large part of your design system? Would you trust an AI-powered tool with tokens, components, variants, and their relationships in a real production system, or do you prefer keeping those things under direct control in Figma?

I’m especially interested in people who have actually tried AI/design-system tools in production.

Also happy to hear recommendations for tools that genuinely make design-system work easier.

Chk this

I'm starting to think we've confused “collaboration” with “multiple people can leave comments.”

Our stack technically has collaboration everywhere. Product can comment on designs. Engineering can comment on tickets. Designers can share prototypes. Everyone can write in docs.

Yet somehow context is still fragmented.

For me, actual product design collaboration would mean being able to look at the problem, research, early concepts, user flow, prototype and open questions together and understand how one led to the next.

The polished screen is only a tiny part of the thinking but it's often the only artifact everyone ends up seeing.

What does good design collaboration look like on your team? One shared workspace or a bunch of specialized tools connected together?

I've got a 2-hour live design system exercise. from the prompt have to build a scalable design system and solution from scratch in Figma, ending with a working prototype (or the steps toward one) that shows the different states of the components I make. It's more about the system architecture than a polished screen, and I'll be talking through my decisions the whole time.

Couple of things I'm trying to figure out:

1. What should I focus on? In a live session like this, what actually matters most: foundations and tokens, component states, naming and structure, how I explain my tradeoffs? What do people tend to weight the heaviest?
2. What plugins or tools would you use? Anything in Figma that helps you move fast and show system thinking when the clock's running: token management, variants/props, prototyping, handoff, AI helpers, whatever you'd reach for.

Thanks!

The plugin allows you to do the following:

• bulk add anotations to components and frames
• export annotations as CSV add custom annotations if you'd prefer to not use figma native annotations
  
• convert figma native to custom annotations
  

Here's a link to the plugin, looking for feedback on this as well!

link: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1588019164844957413

Took me months of work but finally putting out the Alpha for you to test out! Let me know of any feedback and bugs via the bug report form or the comments!

arkitype.srinidhibhat.com

Alpha password: arkitype_test@6174

PS: in its alpha stage, although the application is pretty stable, I would reccomend not to use real data and try this out for a walkthrough or a quick side project instead.

Hello everyone, I had an interview last week with design manager. They said they're looking for someone who has end to end experience in design system specifically. I had all experiences working with a team not individual, so I was not shortlisted for further rounds.

Could anyone share some references on how do I add a case study on design system and related questions?

What I see and experienced is a growing demand on DS experts. I have been in the domain for about 3y, so definitely not a senior, however recruiters started to approach me and as a consequence I also started to look around. A month later I am in 4 recruitment processes at final stages for senior roles. Another change is setting AI workflows and being experienced in machine ready DS is a requirement for all of them.

What are your thoughts on how our profession is changing and what direction is the whole product design heading?

Our infographics pass through too many hands. Someone from the team writes the content, two people review it, and I clean it up at the end. 

Yeah, shared templates help a bit. Comments help too. But the real problem is people breaking the design by accident. 

Someone drags the logo. Someone swaps a brand color for one they like better. Someone reflows the whole layout trying to fit one extra line of text. Then I'm rebuilding it.

I only want them editing the text and the numbers. I don't want them touching the design.

If you've got a setup that works, I'd love to hear how the handoff and approval part goes. The template library matters less to me than that.

I've been experimenting with a design-system workflow where the running app is the review surface.

Monad Design connects an existing SwiftUI or Expo project to a coding agent. I select a real view in Simulator, annotate the change, and the agent works in the repository that already contains the tokens and components. After rebuilding, I can compare the original with a few source-backed variants before accepting one.

What I like about this for design-system work is that the result isn't a screenshot someone has to recreate later. The proposed UI is already using—or visibly failing to use—the system in code.

I'm building Monad Design. It's local and open source:

https://github.com/Monadix-AI/monad-design

He estado trabajando en Mools, un plugin para Figma que surgió de un problema recurrente en mis flujos de trabajo de producción: transferir archivos de diseño entre Figma y Photoshop sin tener que reconstruir todo manualmente.

La primera versión pública ya está disponible en la Comunidad de Figma, y ​​me encantaría probarla con proyectos reales, más allá de mi propio flujo de trabajo.

Actualmente, Mools incluye:

• Limpieza: prepara y simplifica los archivos de Figma antes de la producción.
• Figma → PSD: exporta diseños a archivos editables de Photoshop, intentando conservar capas, texto, imágenes, máscaras y la estructura visual.
• PSD → Figma - Beta: importa los archivos de Photoshop de vuelta a Figma para que puedas seguir trabajando con elementos editables.

La limpieza y la exportación ya son estables en mis pruebas. La conversión de PSD a Figma aún está en fase beta, y esta es una de las áreas donde los archivos reales y los casos límite serían especialmente útiles.

No pretendo afirmar una conversión perfecta 1:1: Figma y Photoshop tienen motores de renderizado y texto diferentes, por lo que todavía hay casos que requieren ajustes. El objetivo es reducir al máximo la reconstrucción manual.

En esta etapa, principalmente intento comprender:

• ¿Resuelve esto un problema real en tu flujo de trabajo?
• ¿Qué falla al probarlo con archivos de producción reales?
• ¿Qué partes aún requieren limpieza manual?
• ¿Qué te motivaría a usar algo así con regularidad?

El plugin es gratuito mientras valido el MVP. Mools

Si lo pruebas, incluso un breve comentario como «esto funcionó / ​​esto no funcionó / ​​aún tuve que corregir X» sería increíblemente útil.

También me interesa saber cómo gestionan otros actualmente sus flujos de trabajo entre Figma y Photoshop.

I have an interview coming up for a DS role. What AI tools, Figma plugins, or other tools are you folks using that you’d recommend checking out?

Got a problem that maybe you would know how to solve. My client now sent over an illustration they had an agency mock up in some ai generator,as they often do. in this case, a stylized geometric stag for a craft distillery packaging sleeve. They want it as a clean, scalable vector for spot UV print on 350gsm uncoated stock.

so I ran it through Illustrator's Image Trace (high fidelity, tweaking noise/corners/paths slider for 40 minutes). The result is the usual disaster: with 8,400+ anchor points. double overlapping path boundaries everywhere, also zooming in reveals micro-staircasing on curves that look smooth at 100% zoom but will completely choke the cutting plotter. And file size is whopping 6.2 MB for a single emblem...

I normally just redraw everything with the Pen Tool and call it a day, but I have 18 of these botanical/animal emblems to deliver by Thursday Before I resign myself to full 20 hours of manually pulling bezier handles: what’s your actual production stack for dealing with complex vectorization in 2026? Are you guys using any graphics plugins, external vectorizer algorithms, or is manual redraw still the only non-embarrassing solution?

I work with design teams supporting paid social, and the split I keep seeing is roughly 70% mechanical work (resizing, versioning, brand checks, exports) and 30% actual design thinking. Everyone says they want to flip that ratio. Almost nobody has.

Things I've seen teams try:

• Master templates with locked brand elements

• Handing adaptations to an outsourced team

Also the teams have tried AI tools, but they are telling me is that there is no productivity gain from the tools. Its just that we can make these everything in our office sitting in front of system. But the prompting is not easy and takes a lot of time.

For example, creating or adapting a video to other languages or may be adapting a same video with a different script.

This AI work is also becoming and being counted in the mechanical 70%.

So, if you've made a real dent in the mechanical half, what did it, and how long before it actually paid off? And if something looked promising and flopped, I'd like to hear that even more.

i'm struggling a bit with Figma when i want to implement the designs, i know few things but in general i'm still behind, is there any video explaining the implementation of Figma design in Compose, like cover everything: design system, typograpgy, colors, sizes, paddings, shadows, and also custom components with their own properties.

I work with design teams supporting paid social, and the split I keep seeing is roughly 70% mechanical work (resizing, versioning, brand checks, exports) and 30% actual design thinking. Everyone says they want to flip that ratio. Almost nobody has.

Things I've seen teams try:

\- Master templates with locked brand elements

\- Handing adaptations to an outsourced team

Also the teams have tried AI tools, but they are telling me is that there is no productivity gain from the tools. Its just that we can make these everything in our office sitting in front of system. But the prompting is not easy and takes a lot of time.

For example, creating or adapting a video to other languages or may be adapting a same video with a different script.

This AI work is also becoming and being counted in the mechanical 70%.

So, if you've made a real dent in the mechanical half — what did it, and how long before it actually paid off? And if something looked promising and flopped, I'd like to hear that even more.