It’s time to get back to the future.

A letter from the founder

December 21, 2019

After working as both a designer and lead developer in digital agencies for over 10 years with world class brands like Nike and Honda, I've seen the massive amounts of wasted time and inefficiencies caused by doing things a certain way, just because that’s the way we did them yesterday.

If the endless meetings, Slack channels, Zoom calls, emails, Agile™ garbage, and everything else in between that distracts us from doing what we were hired for wasn't enough; our workflows in general, and how we think about design and development specifically, are not working properly.

Even if you can't explain why, just like being in “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show”, you've probably felt that something isn't quite right — just as I did.

Today’s “best practices” have us trapped in the past, and I think it’s time to get back to the future.

We are constantly bombarded with the propaganda that “things are moving so fast” and “we can't even keep up with all the rapid technological progress”, but this is actually a lie that we tell each other; as one does not need to look very hard to realize that these soundbites are simply not true. Certainly, when it comes to the design and development process, things have actually not changed very much at all.

“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”

Stemming from using photo editing software to design things for the web, the “handover” process between designers and developers has remained largely unchanged for over 20 years. We desperately need to get back to the future, but I think things are moving way too slowly. Worse still, very few people seem to mind or even be thinking about it.

Because of this status quo, where the source of truth for designers is pixels and the source of truth for developers is code, most people believe that we need to “bridge the gap” between design and development; but I believe that the distance between design and production should be zero.

We will start by releasing design automation plugins for Figma which solve common time wasting tasks faced inside any design team, followed by solving much bigger and more complex problems beyond those. We want to build the best premium Figma plugins to solve important problems that very few people seem to be working on.

I am very optimistic that a much needed new future can be achieved, and I'm excited about the years ahead as we work towards our mission of reducing the distance between design and production to zero.

We won't be saving anything for the swim back.