Let’s kill the design vs. implementation memes.

I have seen a lot of posts/memes lately talking about design in Figma vs. the design that is finally implemented. Memes are kind of funny, I’ll give you that. What is less funny is that we have been exposing this problem but we don’t really talk about the solutions, and as these memes resurface, we are still as square one…so the questions is: How can we find balance between creative idealism and technical pragmatism?

In the end it all comes down to processes and communication. As a design team we need to be able to understand what developers need, how they think, and basically how they do what they do. Here’s a list of things that my team and I have been doing to be able to enable clear communication between us and developers :

How to present your work

Surely we all do this, because it’s the basis of team communication. But how are we doing it is a much interesting question to ask. How we organize and explain our designs in our Figma files is key for people to be able to understand how stuff works.

1. Label your frames. It is important to use labels that are clear for everyone. Usually we label them like so : Who we are>our teams>the design team or Who we are/our teams/the design team. This helps quickly place the screen in the hierarchy of the design.