This discussion is related to how design teams can collaborate better.

There are three additions to Figma that would really help design teams:

1. A Linter that verifies rules
2. An Approval workflow
3. A Versioning tool for each design item

1. Linter:

As I start manually building things on Figma, I am very annoyed by small design rules that need to go into everything. For example, let’s look at this button I created:

These buttons follow the below rules:

• Icon should be Gray-400 color
• Icon should have a square bounding box around it, of size 16px
• Padding between icon and text should be 4px
• Padding between button border and content should be 12px and 16px
• Text weight should be 400
• Text Size should be 12pt
• Another interesting general rule: Spacing should be in multiples of 4px because that is easier for developers and it is “harmonious”. Worst case multiple of 2px.

It is very easy to break these rules and not be caught by anyone. For example, when I first created it, I was eyeballing another button, and missed #2. The designer I was working with also didn’t catch it. I eventually caught it. It would be so simple and less mentally taxing if it just showed me which rule I had broken and suggested an auto-fix.

There are Figma Plugins that do this, so it’s not completely new: https://lintyour.design/

2. An Approval Workflow

As more designers join a team, Figma becomes complicated.

<aside> ☝🏼 Software Engineering Analogy: Imagine that you had only VSCode (or Sublime) and your whole team was using that for coding. No Github, no version control. That is what design is like today.

</aside>

There is no equivalent of a Code Review or any sort of Approval flow in Figma. Right now, a designer will edit a file, and hopefully message people to get approval. Now people can add comments. There is no easy way to see Diffs between this and last version. Approvals are not enforced either. This is like coding in Google Docs and then sharing the doc link for code review. A dedicated code review tool is valuable - it adds a formal process around it. Without that, the process is ad-hoc and confusing, requiring human hours of management.

3. Versioning for every design item

Ideally, you should be able to look at a section on a web page, right click, and see who designed it. If you are working on a design team, different designers are working on different things.

Abstract.com is doing this for Sketch, not Figma. It is valued at $200 million as of now: Here are more details about it