It’s time to get back to the future.

After working as both a designer and lead developer in digital agencies over the last 10 years for 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.

Hypermatic Headquarters.

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 realise 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.”

— Christof, The Truman Show

Some light reading material for breaks from work.

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.

DesignOps Melbourne Meetup, 2018.

From 2018–2019, I co-hosted DesignOps — the most dangerous Meetup in Melbourne — with my homie Ch'an (the DesignOps O.G) to share these ideas with other designers and developers. It's an unscripted variety show influenced by old-school hip hop and The Matrix, with occassional speakers.

The Meetup was so much fun, and we built an awesome community of designers and developers. It was obvious to us that Figma was going to be a genre-defining classic, so we helped build a cult-like following for Figma in 2018, when almost everyone was still using Sketch.

I left DesignOps in early 2019 to think about what I wanted to do next. In July 2019, based on my Figma API demo, I was invited to the Figma Plugins BETA, which planted the seed of quitting my job a couple of months later.

It was instantly clear to me how game changing Figma plugins would be, and I started thinking about how they could be used to actually implement some of the ideas we were thinking about with DesignOps — at scale.

Figma socks, all day.

Figma officially launched plugins in August 2019, and I resigned from my job as a lead front end developer a month later in September 2019 — with the totally unvalidated idea to just work on building Figma plugins, and focus all of my time on solving these problems I had been thinking about for years.

On December 20th, 2019, “Figmatic” was born as the first self-funded startup focused on building premium Figma plugins for design automation, which was rebranded to “Hypermatic” on March 27th 2022.

Nothing's equivalent, to the New York State of Mind.

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 optmistic 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.