Joining a new project can be as exciting as it is daunting, especially when you need to familiarize yourself quickly with the existing codebase and development practices. Frontier, our innovative coding assistant, is designed to seamlessly integrate newcomers into the development process, making the transition smooth and efficient.

Here’s how Frontier can be a game-changer for developers new to a project

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   • Seamless Integration: Frontier eliminates the need to manually search for components. Its advanced matching algorithms automatically identify and suggest the right components from the existing codebase that correspond to elements in your Figma designs.
   • Accelerated Learning Curve: This feature not only speeds up the development process but also facilitates a deep understanding of the component architecture without the need to sift through documentation or seek extensive input from senior developers.

2. Learn from the Best with Contributor Insights:

   • Follow Proven Practices: Frontier provides details about the last contributor and modification dates for each component usage, guiding you to follow coding patterns endorsed by top developers within your team.
   • Access to Mentorship: Highlighting contributors also helps identify potential mentors, offering insights into whom to approach for advanced learning and advice on adhering to the best practices.
     

3. Streamlined Onboarding Process

• • Rapid Contribution: Frontier’s deep integration with your project’s existing structures allows you to start contributing meaningful code almost immediately, minimizing the usual learning and adjustment period.
  • Consistent Code Quality: Frontier respects and adapts to your project’s established coding conventions, ensuring all new code is consistent and harmonious with existing development standards.

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Here’s why Frontier can be a game-changer for Managers and Teams:

1. Accelerate Developer Ramp-Up

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3. Boost Team Collaboration:

   Create a supportive environment where new developers are well-informed about team coding responsibilities and patterns, fostering better communication and collaboration.

     

Frontier isn’t just a tool; it’s your partner in coding. By removing the common barriers new developers face, Frontier allows you to focus on what you do best: coding solutions that matter.

Start your journey with Frontier today and experience a smoother, more intuitive integration into your new project.

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The post Joining a New Project? Code Smarter and Faster from Your First Day appeared first on Anima Blog.

Anima recently welcomed Ofer as its new Vice President of Research and Development. With our focus on AI and GenAI, and Ofer’s rich experience at Wix, we believe his perspectives are incredibly valuable to our community. We recently sat down with him for a conversation, and we’re thrilled to share some highlights with you.

For those who may not be familiar, Anima is the modern way of transforming design into code through AI. With over 800,000 installs on Figma and 400,000 on Adobe XD, Anima is leading the way in the design-to-code space.

Ofer, tell us a bit about your background

I’ve been coding, managing software building processes and software engineering projects for almost 30 years. From smaller startups to big companies – but my favorites are startups, of course. I joined Anima after managing the Editor R&D team at Wix for over two years. Before that, I managed R&D in multiple startups and managed and sold my own startup company.

At Anima, we’re focused on automating the visual elements of front-end engineering. Can you share your thoughts on the future of front-end engineering in the AI era?

Designers in our space are experiencing a really big shift over the last few years: they are becoming much more sophisticated, they are more exact in their demands from the front end, and the level of expectations from them is rising and becoming more complex.

Designers themselves are becoming increasingly technical, too. Their demands and expectations from front-end developers are also evolving. They’ve gained a deeper understanding of CSS, design systems, and the intricacies of responsive design. Their tools have evolved too, leading to more structured and efficient workflows. This evolution means that front-end developers are increasingly the technical implementers of the designer’s vision, shifting their role toward technical execution. I see a lot of “ping pong” between these two personas, trying to pin down the design and implementation and often leading to friction between these two critical functions building our digital world.

With the rising expectations and sophistication in UX, the roles of UX and product designers are becoming more prominent. Developers are now utilizing AI tools like Copilot, which enhances their efficiency by reducing time spent on repetitive tasks.

Remember the days when we were grappling with issues like pixel-perfect designs and responsive components? Designs were essentially “flat” images and in some cases were shown in different snapshots based on sizes. However, there were a lot of gaps in behavior that the developer would need to “guess” or discuss with the designer, wasting time for both sides.

Now, tools like Sketch and Adobe XD and predominantly Figma, which supports components, design tokens, and Auto-Layout, are addressing many of these challenges directly in the design phase, saving everyone involved considerable time.

Devs increasingly lean towards open-source solutions, shortcuts, and more streamlined frameworks. The progression from javascript + jQuery/Bootstrap to modern languages and frameworks, TypeScript + Angular, Vue, React, and NextJS is a clear indication of this trend, boosting both efficiency and productivity.

How do you envision AI’s role in this evolving landscape?

Copilot and similar tools, will provide front-end devs shortcuts that would make them more productive. Developers would be able to “pull” code directly from the design and reach production faster with automated tests and without having to repeatedly ping-pong with the designer or other team members.

At Anima, our goal is to develop tools that simplify the development process by shifting the developer focus more towards business logic and less on the mundane work of creating pixel-perfect designs. Our challenge lies in intelligently ‘understanding’ the specific coding practices, frameworks, languages, and subtle nuances unique to your team’s codebase and producing code that looks more like it. This approach aims to eliminate the need to start from scratch every time a designer introduces a new component, alters a composition, or modifies existing designs. Ideally, AI would assist developers in deciphering these elements, allowing them to concentrate on architectural details, the finer aspects of design, and the intricacies of state management and business logic.

We are seeing that Copilot and other similar tools are gaining popularity with developers. I have long ago ditched Google in favor of ChatGPT for my daily “how-do-you-do-this” queries. It’s simpler than Google and gives me the answer rather than sending me through a series of hoops I have to jump through to find my answers. Generative AI is a tremendous leap for productivity.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the future, particularly regarding generative AI, which is a significant part of it. As someone deeply immersed in technology, where do you envision AI altering our reality in, say, the next 5 to 10 years?

Considering the developments of the past 2-3 years, attempting to predict the next five years seems virtually impossible. The impact of ChatGPT, along with the advancements from Meta’s LLAMA2 and Anthropic’s Claude, were beyond my predictions. The pace of progress, especially in the last year, has accelerated exponentially.

I’m inherently optimistic, as are many in the startup and product management communities. Predicting the future is challenging, but I’m confident, especially considering the number of talented individuals working on these projects. I view current AI advancements more as machines with exceptional memory recall rather than possessing a ‘spark of intelligence.’ Therefore, I don’t subscribe to the notion that AI will bring about an apocalyptic change. This perspective is shaped by recent technological breakthroughs: autonomous cars haven’t replaced all drivers, blockchain hasn’t eliminated banks, and quantum computers haven’t decrypted all encryption. These advancements are significant, and while they may revolutionize various fields and technologies, I believe they won’t fundamentally alter the world as a whole.

This technology will be incredibly beneficial, not only for developers but for humanity at large. However, it’s crucial to ensure that AI isn’t solely focused on optimizing tasks like manufacturing “the most efficient screwdriver”, to the point where it could potentially have adverse effects on the world in its pursuit of optimizing efficiency.

Considering the current state of AI, how would you compare open-source platforms to off-the-shelf products like ChatGPT, Claude, and all the projects popping regularly on Hugging Face?

Let’s distinguish between large language models and other AI models. In fields like image categorization and generation, there’s significant progress across various fronts. We’ll likely see which technologies excel once the field stabilizes. In my view, OpenAI has notable gaps in generative imaging, and even GPT-4’s vision capabilities haven’t been as transformative as I initially had hoped.

For instance, many attempt to use GPT-4’s vision capabilities by feeding it a screenshot and expecting it to generate high-quality code. However, in our tests, the results have been less impressive compared to our current state-of-the-art design-to-code technologies. Often, the generated code is inadequate and not a reliable foundation for further development. The outcomes frequently don’t align with what developers or designers would deem usable. A critical question we often consider is whether this serves as a practical starting point for a developer, or does it take more effort to fix than create the code from scratch. Of course, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that future iterations of this technology might overcome these limitations and function more effectively.

In terms of Large Language Models (LLMs), our expectations for Anthropic were higher than their current performance. Nevertheless, we remain optimistic about their upcoming releases. Meta’s solution, while effective, is somewhat limited due to token constraints and issues with hallucinations. GPT-4 Turbo is an impressive tool, but it currently has its limitations, such as generating ‘skeleton code’ that often results in excessive ‘todo’ comments throughout the codebase.

I believe we’re close to seeing the open-source community develop a code-centric public Large Language Model (LLM) like Mistral that rivals OpenAI in specific languages and frameworks, trained on a more targeted set of code templates. Such a development would be a significant breakthrough, though it hasn’t yet occurred.

OpenAI continues to lead in areas like contextual memory, speed, quality, and the pace of advancement. Despite the recent turmoil within the company, I hope this doesn’t significantly impact their progress. They seem to be on the right path, with innovative ideas, and with Microsoft’s support, the advancement of state-of-the-art technology is progressing rapidly.

Fascinating. In the realm of ‘Design to code’ and front-end automation, Anima is currently at the forefront, though this field is still in its nascent stages. Assuming Anima maintains its leadership position, where do you envision the company heading in the future?

My hope is for Anima to be regarded as a Copilot tool, one that developers regularly use to seamlessly integrate their Figma design changes into code. This would enable them to focus on enhancing and refining the code, concentrating on the more complex aspects of R&D.

The code generated by this tool should be familiar with your existing codebase, components, frameworks, and coding style. Ideally, it would take over the routine tasks typically handled by a junior front-end developer, such as creating tests. Additionally, you should be able to interact with it, requesting specific code modifications as needed.

This approach would allow junior engineers to concentrate on more challenging tasks, such as developing state management, good architecture, choose the best framework, work on CI/CD and, of course, the business logic: all of which are not necessarily immediately apparent from the design.

Great, thanks a lot Ofer. And we are very happy to have you onboard!

The post Interview with Ofer, Anima’s Newly Appointed VP of R&D appeared first on Anima Blog.

Latest AI releases from Anima and what’s around the corner

Anima is an AI-powered design-to-code platform, turning Figma/XD into runnable, pixel-perfect code.
In the background, Machine Learning elements are already auto-naming layers and cleaning code, so engineers can build 2x faster.

Anima is the leader of the design-to-code space – With over 700k installs, Anima is the #1 Figma add-on in the community for developers. We proudly serve teams from industry giants like Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Deloitte. Users report a 50% reduction in UI coding time, thanks to Anima.

The longtail of coding conventions

So far, we’ve focused on high-end React and HTML code. The code quality of Anima is unmatched in terms of being pixel-perfect, clean, and maintainable.

In the past 12 months, we’ve held Zoom sessions with over 1000 R&D teams. Despite 44% of the market choosing React for new projects, the Front-end tech stack is fragmented. In 1000 teams, there are multiple repositories, each with its own conventions.

The entry of GenAI

Combining Anima’s state-of-the-art code generation engine with GenAI capabilities means more frameworks, faster development, and maintaining high-performance code.

The use of LLMs enables us to support more coding conventions and scale our offering more quickly.

Since Anima has visual testing built-in and Figma features support from layouts to styles, to components and interactions, and you get all of it right away.

What it means today

As of today, Anima Figma users can start exporting design to Vue/CSS, Vue/Tailwind, (both Vue 2 & Vue 3), and React/Styled-components. In JavaScript or TypeScript. This matrix of code Frameworks, Styles and conventions will keep growing rapidly.

With the power of artificial intelligence, we are poised to expand our framework support, offering developers an even wider array of options for their front-end development needs. This means that whether you’re working with established frameworks like Angular, Ember.js, and Backbone.js, or exploring newer technologies like Svelte, Meteor, or Aurelia, our product will be ready to assist you. We understand that the frontend development landscape is diverse, and our AI-driven approach ensures we can cater to projects of all sizes and complexities.

Moreover, for those seeking simplicity and efficiency, frameworks like Mithril, Alpine.js, and Stencil can also benefit from our AI-enhanced front-end code generation. The future holds exciting prospects as we harness AI to continually enhance our product’s capabilities and support various frameworks, ensuring that we stay at the forefront of innovation in the front-end development landscape.

Just a heads-up, AI might take a bit more time to cook up the code, but the result is top-notch quality and efficiency. Plus, it’s personalized to your team’s coding conventions.

Anima vs multimodals

Anima with GenAI and multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) are both groundbreaking innovations, but they serve different niches in the technological landscape. While Anima focuses on bridging the gap between design and development by directly converting design platforms like Figma into actionable code, such as React, multimodal LLMs combine textual understanding with visual processing to understand and generate content across multiple modalities. Think of Anima as a specialized tool that streamlines the web and app development process, turning design blueprints into reality without the need for manual coding. In contrast, multimodal LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT with image input capabilities are more about broadening the horizons of AI, enabling it to interpret and produce both text and images synergistically. Both are transformative, but while Anima optimizes the workflow for designers and developers, multimodal LLMs open new doors for comprehensive AI-driven content creation and understanding.

Anima excels at translating designs into pixel-perfect code, capturing every detail from platforms like Figma with precision. In contrast, while multimodal LLMs are versatile in handling both text and images, they aren’t tailored for the exacting task of perfect design-to-code replication. Anima ensures design fidelity; LLMs offer broad content understanding.

What’s next?

In the upcoming version of Anima, we’re elevating the design-to-code experience to unparalleled levels of customization. Recognizing that every development team has its own coding style and conventions, Anima will now allow users to provide a sample from their own codebase. The platform will then intelligently analyze and adapt, ensuring that the generated code not only retains pixel-perfect design fidelity but also seamlessly blends with the existing coding patterns and conventions of the user’s project. This personalized approach promises to dramatically reduce integration time and ensure that the output feels right at home within any codebase.

The post Introducing Generative AI in Design-to-Code at Anima appeared first on Anima Blog.

 

I am the CEO and co-founder of Anima, the leading platform for automating design to code with AI.

With over 600K installs, Anima is the #1 tool for developers in the Figma store and was recently named a representative vendor of the design-to-code space by Gartner.

 

I talked recently about the future of product design and development teams. Here, I put things in writing.

 

Our thesis around design-dev alignment is straightforward.

The two worlds of product design and development have been moving toward each other rapidly for over a decade. And although the concepts have become increasingly similar, we still have two sources of truth — Design and Code.
Anima is here to automate design-to-code with AI, freeing developers and designers to create and build digital products faster.

Background: Why is UX so important?

Let’s start with the motivation for improving this process of taking user experience to production.

We live in a digital world. Every day, my phone tells me I spent 3–4 hours on the tiny screen. And thank God my laptop doesn’t tell me how much time I spent there because it’s probably 8–12 hours. We work, communicate, and eventually live a significant portion of our lives on the screen.

We experience everything on the screen through the UX of all the software we use — Google, Slack, Zoom, Gmail, Google Docs, IDEs, Figma, any way of non-face-to-face communication today, financials from banking to trading, shopping, ordering food, reading books, reading the news, watching videos, listening to music, trip planning, taking notes. It’s all digital.

For almost any business today, their website and mobile apps are the new storefront. You want to serve your clients, provide value easily, and engage with them in the best possible way.UX is at the core of every business today, and it is how we experience the world. It is crucial.

Past & present: State of Design-Dev alignment

Over the past decade, designers and developers have made huge progress, introducing new tools and methodologies from handoff tools to the concepts of modular components and all the way to design systems.

• Design handoff — 10 years ago, designers manually created red lines and ‘slices’ and sent them over email or Dropbox. We are now living on the same tools — it started with Zeplin/InVision and now Figma.
• Modular components — This concept was brought from code and adopted with love by design tools, starting with Sketch, and quickly became a standard. It allows us both to design smarter with a more modular design with reusable elements and speaks the same language and concepts between design and code.
• Atomic design — Once we adopted components, Atomic design allowed us to start thinking about hierarchy and expanding design systems into a smarter foundation for design work.
• Design tokens — This is another level of shared communication around repeating values between design & code, from fonts to colors, to corner radius, spacing, etc.

“Design tokens are the building blocks of all UI elements. The same tokens are used in designs, tools, and code.”
– Google’s material design

• Component properties — Components have become even more modular and robust with variables and overrides, allowing even more reuse, and again — similar concepts from development brought into the design process.
• Component variants — Yet another level of modularity, allowing our components to change their layout, content, and hierarchy to support different states (disabled, hover, error, expanded, mobile vs. desktop).
• Responsiveness — Auto-layout, Auto-responsiveness, Pins, Constraints, and other ways to make our design dynamic have made their way to design tools as the standard way to design.

Conclusions from 1000 talks: There is no silver bullet

Talking with a thousand Design system teams over the past year, we learned that the design-development alignment is not a solved problem yet. There is no silver bullet on how to do it perfectly. We are still evolving.

Here’s what we’ve learned from 1,000 talks with design systems teams:

• Figma is not fully updated. And code. And Storybook — Having two sources of truth makes it hard to keep up-to-date design with everything in code/production. A lot of maintenance is required, and most teams can’t afford it. 25% Started to adopt Storybook, and less than 40% managed to keep it updated.
• Everyone redesigns — 30% are redesigning now, 30% plan to redesign soon, and you cannot redesign if the design files do not reflect your live product.
• Multi-layer DS is a thing — Simply put, large companies need a core design system for multiple products/brands and expand it for every product/brand. Making the design system multi-layer.
• Open-source as a base — This is a great best practice. Save time on creating the components that every product has — Why reinvent inputs, buttons, and date pickers? Just define your needs first and align on the open source technology with both design and teams. The most popular choices are MUI and Ant, but many alternatives exist.
• UX Agencies — This is a fascinating case. UX agencies create and manage or hand off design systems regularly. They live and breathe design systems to the extreme and are specialized in setting them up. Here, the best practice of starting with an open-source or a proprietary base DS is widespread.

The future: The next phase is automation

AI is not here to steal our jobs. I believe it will allow us to design faster, build faster, communicate better, and be on the same page.I see the next phase of evolution in automation.Anima plays a crucial part in this phase of evolution. Anima has over 600k installs on Figma and over 300k on Adobe XD. We have recently partnered with Figma to co-launch #DevMode, where Anima turns design into code right inside Figma.

Near-term predictions

Anima is not alone. We will see more automation around design-ops and development alignment:

• Co-pilot design tools — Tools like Diagram will rise and help designers draft new flows based on your Design systems.
• Design Systems governance and adoption are classic tasks for AI.
• UX copy automation tools will assist in writing, micro-copy feedback, and applying voice and tone across your product.
• Tokens automation — Tokens are a great shared language between design and code. Tokens Studio already syncs design and code.
• Storybook automation — Storybook is excellent for DS alignment and adoption but is hard to maintain. AI will maintain it for you.
• Responsiveness and dynamic layouts (i.e., Auto layout) are incredible but take time. It will be automated, created, and maintained for you.

A lot is coming now that screen-first design tools have matured, and with new technologies that are now available thanks to Genetarive AI.

Where to Go From Here

First, I invite you to follow me & Anima on Twitter/LinkedIn. We’ll be announcing our upcoming releases, all of which are centered around AI-powered, automated design-to-code.My previous piece was related to the future of designers and developers in the AI revolution.

The post The Future of Design-Dev Alignment and Methodology appeared first on Anima Blog.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Anima, an AI-powered design-to-code platform. Anima turns design and code into a two-way street with AI. With over 400k installs, Anima is the #1 tool for developers in the Figma store and was recently named a representative vendor of design-to-code tech by Gartner.

In this article, I’ll give you my take on the future of design and development considering recent advances in AI and what’s around the corner.

The AI Genie is Out of the Bottle

Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT, process and generate code at a human level after learning from every open source across the internet. And OpenAI is not alone.

Google’s Bard reviews and writes great code, Facebook’s LLaMA was open-sourced for noncommercial use, and there are more open-source projects such as Replit’s LLMs.

In other words, the AI genie is out of the bottle.

On the visual front, models like Midjourney can generate incredible images, from photos to art, for user interfaces.

These rapid advancements are transforming entire industries, including design and development, as emerging tools and platforms are being built on these cutting-edge technologies.

Design and development will look very different five years from now. So will content marketing, support, video production, and countless others. AI is here to stay, and it will change everything.

AI Will Help You Run Faster

I envision a future where R&D teams can deliver products 10x faster—and I think it’ll be a reality within a few years. The result will be tiny teams that are able to build and maintain large, complex products. Products that used to require too much work to be commercially viable will suddenly make sense. We will see software solutions for everything, everywhere, all at once.

Take CoPilot, GitHub’s AI coding buddy, as an example. CoPilot writes 40–60% of the code for developers that use it today—which makes them 2x faster. Microsoft — which owns GitHub—recently announced CoPilot for its office suite. It will help you write in Word, create Excel formulas, and design PowerPoint slides in a fraction of the time.

What would a CoPilot for Figma look like, doing 40–80% of the grunt design work? We will soon see dozens of these tools, and the best ones will be widely adopted.

AI-Powered Design to Code

Here at Anima, we’re focused on automating processes between design and code. We are making Design and Code a 2-way street.

The lines between product design and front-end development will blur as design work automatically impacts the code base and vice versa. As a result, team structures and methodologies will look very different five years from now.

R&D and design leaders must prepare their organizations to adapt to this new reality.

Opportunities and Challenges for Designers and Developers

Every designer can now create illustrations, photos, 3D renders, and other labor-intensive visuals in seconds.

Every developer can now code in any popular language, train models, and solve common problems in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Soon, individuals and teams that adopt AI technology will deliver 10x faster than before.

Generative AI can help unlock creativity and approaches that may not have been considered previously, leading to more innovative solutions.

With the rapid rate of AI progress, designers and developers must continuously acquire new skills and methods in order to deliver more value and stay relevant.

We are becoming the architects and leaders for teams of AI agents.

On the flip side, there are concerns about the potentially negative impacts of generative AI. Some creators worry that AI may replace their jobs altogether or make them less valuable to clients and employers. This is why it’s important to understand both the capabilities and limitations of generative AI—and to be able to harness the technology to scale our impact.

Future of Design and Development Work in the Age Of AI

I am very optimistic about the future of design and development jobs.

It will be much cheaper to build software overall, which will mean more and more demand for software. So I expect a big wave of new opportunities for designers and developers coming soon.

Developers can look at this as a new level of abstraction. We’ve had Assembly, then C, then object-oriented, then garbage collection, then Python and JS — and we can consider the Prompt as the next level.

Ride that wave. Embrace AI and grow into harnessing its power.

AI Will Unlock Scaled Experiences

The way I see it, AI will allow us to do things that don’t scale — at scale.

AI can enable large-scale customization for micro-segments, offering tailored design, content, and experiences for different user groups. While there may be some initial hesitation to trust AI with such tasks, this trend will eventually take hold.

Video, voice, and conversational interfaces — the rapid improvement in AI-generated voice and video will lead to more conversational interfaces. You will be able to offer your users a higher level of UX and improve their day-to-day experience.

Where to Go From Here

First, I invite you to follow me & Anima on Twitter. We’ll be announcing our upcoming releases, all of which are centered around AI-powered, automated design-to-code.

If you‘d like early access to our upcoming LLM-based features, join Anima’s Discord. We’ll send out beta invitations on our channel around July-2023. Meanwhile, let us know about your hopes, dreams, and innovative ideas for the world of AI.

The post AI Revolution: The Future of Designers and Developers appeared first on Anima Blog.

Gartner’s newly-released report about the benefits of design-to-code technology for organizations has a lot to say about Anima’s platform—and how R&D leaders should utilize it.

Here’s how Gartner breaks down the design-to-code spectrum:

New Gartner research on #DesignToCode – including @AnimaApp @avocode @infragistics and @teleportHQio https://t.co/kOLEzrQB3S [Gartner paywall] pic.twitter.com/PXgtmqM6gU

— Mark O’Neill (@TheMarkONeill) November 2, 2022

Anima, according to Gartner’s definition, is a “modern design-to-code tool” that automates 50 percent of the frontend development process. This dramatically reduces both time to market and R&D costs—so much that Gartner featured Anima as an important Vendor in the report.

What can Anima do for organizations?

The problem we solve

Frontend development is the biggest bottleneck in the product development lifecycle. In the traditional handoff process, designers build an image-based version of the product in tools like Figma and Adobe XD, and developers attempt to translate those images into code for a fully functional final product. It’s inefficient, expensive, and requires countless iterations—because a lot gets lost in translation.

Anima’s design-to-code platform automates frontend development, turning image-based designs into clean frontend code for developers that, with a little refactoring, is ready to deploy.

Anima generates clean code for individual components, entire screens, and complete projects

Benefits for Enterprises

Anima enables enterprises to ship products and features 2-4x faster by eliminating the frontend bottleneck. With the current developer shortage and growing demand for new products and features, reducing time to market is essential to remain competitive. Frontend automation allows you to scale your product faster, with greater consistency, without scaling your operations.

Anima also automates design system management and boosts adoption across your entire organization. With continuous syncing between Storybook and Figma, you can ensure that designers and developers are building with the same set of production components, and that developers are using live production code instead of autogenerated code. Combining our design-to-code technology with our Storybook to Figma integration—as Gartner recommends—further improves code quality and decreases TTM.

Benefits for Agencies and Consultancies

Anima slashes R&D costs by automating the most expensive frontend development work. This significantly increases your margins on every project, since fewer developer hours means a lower cost to deliver.

Anima also allows you to take on more contracts without hiring more developers, because you can allocate fewer developers to each deliverable.

Anima’s customers

Anima’s customers have saved hundreds of thousands of developer hours using our platform, and run the gamut from emerging startups to Fortune 500 companies. And because Anima’s platform benefits the entire product team and integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows, adoption is a breeze.

Anima’s design-to-code technology

Anima’s algorithms are ahead of the curve

Gartner’s article mentions a number of the cutting-edge algorithms Anima uses to generate code behind the scenes. These include computer vision algorithms that mimic the way a human engineer would build the DOM, machine-learning algorithms that name elements and classes, auto tagging, and DOM cleanup—to name a few.

Anima’s code is developer-friendly

Anima was built to produce high-quality code for developers. That’s because when you’re building large, dynamic products with complex logic and backend architecture, developers need to be part of the process.

Anima is the #1 Figma plugin for developers

Anima is a low-code tool, not a no-code tool

No-code tools allow teams to build basic websites and applications. However, the code they generate is unusable for developers, as these tools aren’t intended for developers. Teams that include engineers should use low-code tools.

Low-code tools like Anima generate clean, scalable code that engineers can easily build upon and connect their backend architecture to. Low-code is the only design-to-code option for teams that include developers.

Start delivering better products, faster, at a fraction of the cost.

The post Gartner discusses design-to-code and Anima’s benefits for enterprises appeared first on Anima Blog.

We’ve seen it before. As a company grows and more people contribute to a product’s design and development, the need for a single source of truth grows as well.

Web-based product development starts small, with one person designing screens and another one coding them. Sometimes one person does both. It’s not until the product becomes more extensive and feature-rich that we start extracting the reusable parts into components. 

While we don’t feel the need to organize and categorize components when only one person uses them, it becomes more urgent as teams get bigger and products grow more complex.

At this point, a component library is needed—with parallel versions in Storybook and Figma—that’s easy to access with all components neatly organized. In other words, code components and design components need to match for teams to benefit from the efficiency, consistency, and scalability that component libraries provide.

But which is the single source of truth? Is it code or design? Storybook or Figma?

Spoiler alert: we think that code, and therefore Storybook, is the single source of truth. Here’s why.

How a product is born

It starts in Figma

It is most common for product development to begin with a design. A Figma file, for example. The process of extracting and placing reusable components in a library takes place in Figma. A component library can be created with any modern design tool—but to build the actual product, these components need to be written in code.

Figma components become code components

Once components are designed in Figma,  the same process repeats on the development side. Developers build each designed component, extracting reusable parts, and placing them neatly into a library. Today there are several solutions for creating UI component libraries, but Storybook is the most popular.

Figma component support

Figma recently added support for properties, which makes creating components in Figma more like creating them in code. It sounds great, except some designers argue that making designers think like developers limits their creativity.

The gap between Figma and production

Components created in Figma can be mapped almost identically to their counterparts in Storybook. We say almost because there’s still a significant gap, and bridging it is not easy. There is no simple automated bit-by-bit conversion between Figma components and Storybook components. As of today, developers are paid very well to perform this process manually.

Why it’s hard to scale products and teams

Siloed teams

Imagine a company with separate design and development teams. Each has its own isolated component library, and they are not connected to each other in any way.

Design system drift

As time passes, these two libraries—one in Figma and one in Storybook—drift apart. That’s because aligning them is an expensive, never-ending effort that uses a lot of human capital. To keep Figma and Storybook in sync, teams need to manually identify the differences between components, agree on which version is the source of truth, and override the other.

This is a frustrating process that a lot of us avoid. Often, component library efforts are neglected altogether in favor of shipping features faster.

The problem: two sources of truth

Having two competing sources of truth is a classic problem that costs teams and organizations a lot of time and money.

The solution: a single source of truth

It’s every R&D leader’s dream. A single source of truth that seamlessly syncs design and development. But in reality, manually maintaining a single source of truth is so time-consuming and labor-intensive that it only works in a few companies that have the resources—and willingness—to invest.

So what is the single source of truth?

Is the source of truth what designers intend, or is it the code that emerges from production? Is it Figma or Storybook?

At Anima, we believe the code (i.e. Storybook) is the single source of truth—and here’s why:

Even though products begin with the components in the design, the end-users of those products will actually experience the components from the code. The single source of truth, then, is what users will actually see in the end.

In reality, the future of product development will be led by code. That’s because although the genesis of a product might be in Figma, the product itself—the one users will perceive and interact with—is, was, and will be built with code. The sooner teams recognize this fundamental truth, the sooner they’ll reap the competitive benefits of synced component libraries and robust design systems.

Create a single source of truth between Storybook and Figma. Automatically. Signup here

The post What is the single source of truth: Storybook or Figma? appeared first on Anima Blog.

If you’re looking for design system tools that’ll help maximize your design system’s impact and minimize the effort involved, you’ve come to the right place. 

Design systems can help you build and scale your product quickly and cost-effectively. They dramatically increase consistency and reduce redundancy by giving designers and developers a shared set of pre-made UI components, styles, and elements to use across products and features.

Design systems are also challenging to build, maintain, and evangelize across tools and teams—which can outweigh their benefits.

We compiled this list of design system tools to help you overcome these obstacles and select the right solution for your product, your organization, and your existing tech stack. Explore them all, or click the links below to jump to the tool of your choice.

• Storybook
• Figma
• Anima
• Adobe XD
• Zeroheight
• Knapsack
• Invision DSM
• Sketch libraries

How to build a design system quickly and easily using MUI components

The problem with design systems

Constant evolution

You don’t just build a design system. It requires continuous collaboration and resources from multiple teams. And since a design system is constantly evolving, it needs to be continuously reviewed and updated to ensure there is no inconsistency between design and production.

Two sources of truth

A frequent issue for many teams and organizations is that they have two sources of truth: the design library and the production code. When design and code components have inconsistencies, this results in drift between what is designed and what is developed. Maintaining two sources of truth is twice the work.

Manual management

Building and managing a design system manually—as most organizations do—is a huge drain on resources. It means either dedicating an entire team, which is expensive, or tapping existing design and development resources, which spreads designers and developers thin. In most cases, both options are a no-go for startups and smaller organizations with limited human and financial capital—but tools that automate some or all of the process are beginning to change that.

8 design system tools for organizations

Here’s a list of the leading tools for building, managing, and maintaining your design system. Some are design-focused, some are development-focused, and the remainder are complete solutions that aim to bridge the gap between design and development.   

Storybook

Storybook is a free open-source frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. Thousands of teams use it for UI development, testing, and design system documentation. Predominantly aimed at developers, Storybook helps you develop hard-to-reach states and edge cases without needing to run the whole app.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Developers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Build UI pages and components in isolation
• Mock hard-to-reach edge cases
• Ability to use finished UI components in your apps

Syncing capabilities

• No built-in syncing with design tools
• Official Figma plugin only lets you compare Storybook and Figma components side-by-side
• An addon from Anima enables automatic, continuous syncing with Figma

Integrations

Storybook has over 400 integrations available, so you can connect with most tools your team is already using. 

Figma

Figma is an application predominantly aimed at designers to craft and create industry-leading interfaces with greater efficiency. Figma is rich in tools for collaboration enabling multiple people to explore ideas together in real-time, from FigJam whiteboarding sessions through to complex hi-fidelity designs, prototypes, and everything in between.

Figma allows you to create variable components that can be reused throughout your designs. You can also turn a Figma file into a library from which other teams across your organization can access the same components. Creating a shared design component library helps distributed teams stay consistent and speeds up workflows by reducing redundancy. It also makes sharing updates from your codebase in one go instead of updating a bunch of isolated libraries individually.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Designers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
• Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
• Everything in one place: Shareable assets, variable components, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

• No way to sync design and production components out of the box
• Storybook plugin allows side-by-side comparison between components
• Anima plugin allows continuous syncing with Storybook

Integrations

Figma offers many integrations with other tools to help create a seamless design workflow, including user testing, developer handoff, collaboration and productivity, and more.

Anima

Anima is a design-to-code (and code-to-design) platform that’s changing the way teams build the frontend—by automating it. Anima integrates with Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch, allowing teams to build live prototypes and apps and even launch websites from their existing design tools. Plus, Anima converts any design into developer-friendly React, Vue, and HTML in a single click. In addition to automating frontend development, Anima’s Storybook integration for Figma automates much of the design system management process. You can give it a spin here

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Designers
• Developers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Anima’s Storybook Integration for Figma automates syncing between your design and production libraries
• Generate a Figma library from Storybook with all variants, styles, and Auto Layout parameters in one click
• Publish and share your synced Figma library with distributed teams across your organization
• Quickly create designs using the same components that your developers are using in production
• Handoff design

Syncing capabilities

• Anima enables you to sync Storybook with Figma automatically so designers and developers have a single source of truth 
• When a component changes in Storybook, you’ll be notified in Figma with the option to update it across libraries and instances
• Handoff designs containing your own production components, with links to each component in Storybook

Integrations

Anima integrates with the design system tools teams already use (Storybook and Figma) so that you don’t need to reinvent your tech stack. In a few clicks, you can automate syncing between the two, eliminating the need for constant, expensive manual updates. Plus, Anima integrates with a range of resources teams already use—from open source libraries to serverless hosting and CMS platforms.  

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is a vector-based design tool specifically created to empower designers to create the latest and greatest websites, apps, and other digital products. You can build a library of styles and components to build the design portion of the design system with Adobe XD. These styles and components can then be used throughout your XD design files.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Designers

Features

• Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
• Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
• Everything in one place—shareable assets, variants, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

• Adobe XD has no built-in solution to sync design with code

Integrations

Adobe XD uses plugins to integrate with other tools in your team’s toolkit. You can easily add plugins through the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app. Adobe XD can be used standalone or as part of the bigger Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps.

Zeroheight

Zeroheight is a tool created to connect everyone working with your design system—engineers, designers, product, and marketing teams. Zeroheight works with a range of tools, including Figma and Storybook, enabling you to centralize documentation from each in a single place.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Developers
• Designers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Integrates seamlessly with the leading design and documentation tools
• Interact with Storybook components and code examples
• Easy collaboration across teams and functions
• Share internally and externally
• Add documentation for all tools in one place

Syncing capabilities

• Syncs with many of the most popular design system tools, but doesn’t sync between them
• You can sync your Figma styles and Storybook code to the platform, but only for documentation
• No direct, automated syncing between design libraries and your codebase
• Can help guide and streamline manual syncing

Integrations

Zeroheight integrates with Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Storybook, and Abstract.

Knapsack

Knapsack is a design system platform that provides end-to-end infrastructure as well as collaborative tooling that empowers teams to connect their design decisions to developed experiences. This allows organizations to scale their digital products more easily, and increases adoption and collaboration.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Developers
• Designers
• UX writers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Git-backed version control
• Third-party embeds from popular tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, and more
• Playground for exploring patterns and themes
• Feedback and approval capabilities
• Automatic updates to tokens and components in docs
• Easily created patterns from existing components

Syncing capabilities

• No automated solution for keeping design and code in sync
• Manual updates are still required

Integrations

Knapsack integrates with Figma, Adobe XD, Abstract, and Framer Cloud.

Invision DSM

Invision Design System Manager (DSM) is Invision’s take on the design system that adds another solution to their growing suite of tools. The Invision design system is aimed more at designers and uses Invision’s Craft plugin to sync designs from Sketch and Figma. You can then use Invision inspect to view code snippets. You can also use Invision DSM to preview stories from Storybook.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Designers
• Developers
• Product managers and teams

Features

• Use the Invision Craft plugin to sync designs from Figma and Sketch to DSM
• Preview stories from Storybook
• Invision DSM can be used seamlessly with the other Invision products
• Component search
• Component drag and drop
• Version history

Syncing capabilities

Invision DSM can’t sync code with design directly, but is a great tool for documentation and comparison.

Integrations

Invision DSM integrates with Figma, Sketch, and Storybook

Sketch Libraries

Sketch Libraries are Sketch documents where you can centralize components and key elements in your design system. This includes variants, styles, icons, fonts, colors, artboard templates, and more. The libraries can be used by all of your other sketch documents and shared across teams, but need to be updated manually to keep them synced with the codebase.

Who it’s for

• Startups
• Organizations
• Designers

Features

• Searchable assets both within the library and from other files
• Shareable styles that anyone can use and apply to any object
• Everything in one place—shareable assets, variable components, icons, backgrounds, images, avatars, fonts, and more

Syncing capabilities

• Sketch doesn’t have any built-in features for syncing design libraries with production code.

Integrations

Sketch has an extensive list of integrations enabling you and your team to utilize your design system in Sketch, assuming your libraries are kept up-to-date. Most of these integrations focus on documentation, handoff, user testing, and prototyping.

What are the best design system tools for startups & small organizations?

For startups and organizations with limited resources, the best design system software is one that your team can manage. Ideally, it’s a combination of tools that reduces or eliminates the amount of manual management required—because manual management is too expensive for most lean organizations. 

If you have a design library in Figma and code components in Storybook, you can sync them continuously using Anima. Anima automates the creation and maintenance of a single source of truth between design and code—making the benefits of a design system accessible to all. 

In a nutshell

Building a design system is no small feat. It takes a lot of hard work and requires design and engineering to come together. Keeping your design and code in sync is a never-ending task involving a lot of manual labor and frequent cross-checking of styles and components. An out-of-sync design system can cause many discrepancies between your design and code.

The best design system management tool for you depends on your budget, team size, and desired feature set. But one thing’s certain: if you’re running lean and can’t dedicate an entire team to manual design system management, automation is your friend.

Platforms like Anima can help you keep design and production in continuous sync—without changing your stack—and eliminate the need for costly manual updates. That means startups and small organizations with limited resources can actually reap the benefits of a design system, allowing them to spend less, move faster, and scale more efficiently.

Automate design system management with Anima 

The post 8 design system tools for any organization appeared first on Anima Blog.

If you’re wondering what a design system is and how establishing one can impact your product or organization, you’ve come to the right place.

Digital products are getting larger and more complex to meet soaring demand—and need to be delivered faster than ever for organizations to stay competitive. This means the traditional design-to-development process, where designers build each screen from scratch and developers translate them into code, isn’t fast or consistent enough to build those products at scale. 

Design systems solve this problem by creating a single source of truth between design and code—so that designers and developers build products with a shared, defined set of reusable components and standards. Robust design systems can provide a nearly-lossless handoff from design to production with minimal effort from either side. This ensures consistency across complex products and distributed teams, streamlines development, and creates an optimal user experience for your product. 

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions so you’ll come away with a clear understanding of what a design system is, how you or your organization might benefit from one, and where to start.

1. What is a design system?
2. What is included in a design system?
   1. Component library
   2. Pattern library
   3. Style guide
3. Why use a design system?
   1. Advantages 
   2. Disadvantages
4. How to create a design system
   1. Build from scratch
   2. Adapt an open source library
5. How to manage a design system
   1. Manually
   2. Automatically

TL;DR

Design systems:

• streamline production and improve consistency by giving designers, developers, and teams a shared set of components and standards—one in images and one in code.
• consist of component libraries, pattern libraries, style guides, and code documentation.
• can be built from scratch or adapted from open-source libraries like MUI, Ant Design, and iOS to make the process more manageable.
• require continuous maintenance, updating, and syncing between design and code—which can be expensive for orgs with limited resources.
• are increasingly being automated to help smaller orgs reap the benefits with fewer maintenance costs, and larger orgs manage increasingly complex design systems at scale. 

What is a design system?

A design system is like a box of Lego blocks for a product team. It’s a synced library of prefabricated components and standards—one in images and one in code—that both designers and engineers can use as a single source of truth. When design and production use the same set of components and standards to build products, they significantly reduce handoff friction while increasing efficiency and consistency.

Instructions from a set of lego blocks

What is included in a design system?

Design systems come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most conventional examples consist of the following elements: component libraries, pattern libraries, and style guides.

We’ll explain each of these elements using examples from three of the most popular design systems—Material UI (Google), Ant Design, and iOS (Apple).

1. Component library

A component library is a collection of all components within a design system—aka the modular building blocks that form the product. When properly synced between design and code, a component library serves as a single source of truth for designers and developers. Although the contents of a component library can vary based on a company’s needs and capacity, it typically includes the following elements:

1. Components
2. Component definitions
3. Component variants (states)
4. Best practices
5. Code snippets and documentation

Components

Components are the smallest building blocks in a design system. They include elements like buttons, chips, dividers, and input fields. Designers work with image-based components in tools like Figma and Adobe XD, while developers work with corresponding code-based components in tools like GitHub and Storybook.

Component definitions

Component definitions tell you when to use a particular component. Design systems define every use case for each component to help teams build consistent experiences that work the way users expect. Here’s how MUI defines a button component:

A button component definition from Material UI

Component variants (states)

Variants—also referred to as states—are components that are similar to each other but with minor differences. They’re typically used to represent different styles and states of a base component. For example, a basic button component has primary, secondary, pressed, disabled, and rounded variants, to name a few.

Without variants, component libraries would have to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of unique UI elements. However, variants branch out from basic fundamental components to keep component libraries simple, organized, and easy to maneuver.

Many component libraries provide style guidelines and examples for each variant.

Button component variants from Ant Design

Best practices

While component definitions tell you when to use a component, best practices tell you where and how to use them. Best practices guide you through specific use scenarios with detailed descriptions for consistent implementation.

Button component best practices from Material UI

Code snippets and documentation for developers

Code snippets present actual code for each component in any supported frameworks and languages. Design systems also include API documentation that explains how to modify these code snippets. This helps developers accurately and efficiently implement the style and functionality of the design in the final product.

Code snippet for an Ant Design button component

API documentation for an Ant Design button component

2. Pattern library

Patterns are reusable building blocks made up of smaller components arranged in specific layouts. Cards, for example, are made up of button components, images, and text with defined spacing between elements. There is no universal way to distinguish patterns from components. In fact, they’re often not put in separate categories at all, since they’re really just complex components comprised of more basic ones. 

Pattern example: a card layout made up of different MUI components

3. Style guide

A style guide is a comprehensive manual on how to use design system components together to ensure the best user experience. They’re separate from individual component guidelines, and cover things like how to create intuitive component patterns and where to request certain user actions in a flow.

There’s a spectrum of how strict a style guide can be. For example, Apple Human Interface Guidelines provide extremely detailed design patterns and themes, whereas Ant Design is less prescribed. The former will result in a more uniform, proven-to-work user experience, while the latter gives more room to explore, but with greater uncertainty. 

Style guide documentation from iOS design system

Why use a design system?

Advantages 

The advantages of using a design system can be narrowed down to efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.

Build and scale efficiently

One of the key metrics of product success is the speed of delivery and ability to scale. The option to reuse prefabricated components from a library is an invaluable advantage for both designers and developers. Designing commonly used UI elements becomes a drag-and-drop process for designers, and implementing features becomes a copy-and-paste process with a few tweaks for developers.

Deliver accurately

Designers and developers build products with a shared set of reusable components and standards, so designs don’t get lost in translation. Instead, products look, feel, and function exactly as designers intended with minimal iterations. 

Provide consistent user experience

Using a design system ensures a clear and predictable user experience across every product, feature, and touchpoint in an organization. That’s because design systems utilize a uniform visual language for every asset, so users know exactly how to navigate and what to expect—regardless of where they land.

Disadvantages 

Design system cost

Like any product, design systems are constantly evolving to meet users’ needs and organizations’ business goals, and building and managing them requires a dedicated team. A design system can have thousands of components and variants to build and manage—which only grows as your product becomes more complex. And while manually syncing those components between design and code is inefficient and prohibitively expensive for leaner organizations, there are a growing number of options that automate the process.

Design systems can constrain creativity

Designers may be less likely to explore new approaches when they’re limited to a design system. This potential downside, however, pales in comparison to the overall benefits of streamlined, scalable product development for organizations. Plus, a robust design system should provide ample flexibility for designers to propose new solutions.

How to create a design system

Build a design system from scratch

Building a design system from scratch is expensive, time-consuming, and typically requires a dedicated team. Designers build all of the image-based components and their variants, and developers turn them into a parallel set of code components. Design system teams also develop a set of standards ensuring components are implemented in a defined, consistent way. Because of the resources involved, building from scratch is typically reserved for large organizations with plenty of human and financial capital.

Adapt an open source design system 

Adapting an open source design system—like Material UI or Ant Design—is a great way to get up and running with a small team or a tight timeline. You can customize open source components’ colors, typography, and spacing to match your brand and visual language, and have a robust design system with a fraction of the time and resources it takes to build one from scratch. Plus, extensive documentation for developers makes it a breeze to implement the design system in code.

Adapting an existing design system is the best option for lean organizations, as well as more established companies that simply want to move faster. 

How to adapt an open source design system in 6 simple steps 

How to manage a design system

Manual design system management

Design systems are never “done.” They’re constantly evolving as new components and variants are added and old ones are changed. Updating design components and code components manually—and making sure they’re in sync—often requires a dedicated team. It’s expensive and time-consuming, which makes design systems inaccessible to organizations with limited human and financial resources.

As design systems continue to grow in size and complexity, the cost of manually maintaining them will soon outweigh their benefits.

8 design system management tools for startups and organizations

Design system automation

There are an increasing number of tools that automate design system management. Anima, for example, can turn your code components  in Storybook into native Figma library in a click—including all variants—and sync them continuously.  This vastly reduces the time and resources required for maintenance, so even small, lean organizations can reap the benefits. Automation is also becoming a necessity for enterprises to manage increasingly large, complex design systems.

Get the benefits of a robust design system—without the costs

Signup with Anima

The post Design systems: what they are, why you need one, and where to start appeared first on Anima Blog.

In the world of composable architecture—where organizations mix and match technologies, tools, and services to build software fast and stay agile—partnerships are more valuable than ever. That’s because wherever you fit in the tech stack, complementary partnerships can expand your market reach and amplify your impact.

At Anima, we partner with tools and services that help our users ship faster, with greater autonomy and flexibility. Which is why we’re excited to introduce the Anima Partners Program.

Partnerships at Anima

What Anima does

Anima is a design-to-code (and code-to-design) platform that’s changing the way teams build frontend. Designers can export developer-friendly React, Vue, or HTML code for engineers—and even launch websites—directly from design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch. Developers can skip the grunt work of coding UI from scratch. Teams can deliver better apps and websites with a fraction of the time and resources.

Why partner with Anima

Anima’s front-end code automation places us at the intersection of digital product design and front-end development. Our users include R&D, marketing, and product design teams, and our platform has been adopted by companies of all sizes.

Since Anima is back end agnostic, design tool agnostic, and hosting agnostic, we’re able to seamlessly integrate with a diverse range of tools and solutions to help our users ship products 10x faster.

Why Anima wants to partner with you

We appreciate our partners, because together we amplify the value that our shared customers get. And in turn, we merge our audiences and grow our individual market shares. It’s a win-win. We’re already seamlessly integrated with countless tools and services, including Figma, Storybook, Adobe XD, Netlify, Material UI, Strapi, Firebase, Sketch, Bootstrap, Slack, and more. And we’d love to add you to the list.

Anima’s partnerships and integrations

Design tools

Anima integrates with the most popular design tools—Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch—as an in-app plugin that allows designers to keep their current workflows. This means designers, developers, teams, and organizations can:

• Convert designs into React, HTML, or Vue.js code right from their existing design tools.
• Build and launch live websites directly from their existing design tools.
• Insert ready-to-use React components into their Figma designs.
• Access an automatically generated Styleguides written in CSS to easily recognize the building blocks of each design.
• Manage their design systems automatically by syncing their Storybook with Figma.

Back end systems, serverless options, and headless CMS services

Anima’s front end code is back end agnostic. Developers can connect any existing back end, pick their favorite serverless architecture—like Google Firebase or AWS Amplify—or connect a headless CMS like Strapi or Contentful.

Hosting

Customers can deploy Anima’s generated React, HTML, and Vue code using their favorite hosting services. AWS, Google, and Azure are very popular, and we also see dedicated services like Netlify and Vercel becoming key components in our users’ composable architecture.

Developer tools

Developers feel at home with Anima’s code, whether working in GitHub, editing in VS Code, or inspecting in CodeSandbox or CodePen. For design systems teams, we have Storybook integration for Figma that automatically syncs design libraries with production code.

And more

Countless tools generate greater value when paired with Anima, and vice versa. For example, Anima’s generated code lets designers and teams scale their prototype testing with FullStory and Hotjar, embed YouTube, Vimeo, and Lottie files in their prototypes and websites, and track product development using Slack updates. And there’s so much more we can do collaboratively.

Anima integrations showcase

Check out these apps built with Anima and the tech stacks that were used to ship them at lightning speed. This is just a tiny example of what’s possible with our growing list of integrations and partnerships. Check out more on our Anima Showcase page.

Basic React app

Figma + Anima + Netlify

In this sample project, we created an interview simulation app with Figma + Anima, then launched it on Netlify using Anima’s generated React code. Here’s how.

Banking app

Figma + Anima + Recharts + Ant Design + Strapi.io + Netlify

We redesigned SVB’s banking app using Anima’s open source Component Library for Figma, connected our data, and went live. With Anima’s ready-to-use React components from Recharts and Ant Design—plus a little help from our partners—we were able to build and launch in just two days. We used Strapi’s headless CMS as the back end and deployed the app on Netlify. With this powerful tech stack, it took us 1 day to design and 1 day to go live. Here’s how.

Basic Vue.js app

Figma + Anima + Vue.js + fuse.js + Netlify

This LGBTQ+ calendar app was designed in Figma and launched on Netlify using Anima’s generated Vue code. All we needed to do was make a few tweaks, add some logic,  deploy to Netlify, and voilà! We had a live app in less than 3 hours of work!

Offer an integration

What can we make with your tech solution or service?

We have a growing list of integrations to help our users ship faster, adapt more easily, and enhance their workflows—and we’re always looking for new technology partners.
Interested in becoming a technology partner? Drop us a line at partnerships@animaapp.com.

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