The Gap Between Figma and Production: Why Handoff Fails and How Design Systems Fix It

Source: Dev.to

The Designer‑Developer Gap

You know the feeling. You’ve spent the last two weeks refining a new feature in Figma:

• The auto‑layout is perfect.
• The component states are meticulously organized.
• You’ve even prototyped the micro‑interactions to show exactly how that dropdown should spring open.

You hand it off to the engineering team with a sense of pride, maybe even a little excitement.

The Reality

Two sprints later, you see the implementation in the staging environment:

• The font weights are wrong.
• The padding is inconsistent.
• The hover state you spent an hour perfecting is missing entirely.
• That dropdown? It just instantly appears with zero animation.

You file a ticket, maybe send a Slack message with a screenshot and a red circle drawn around the issue. The developer replies:

“Oh, the library we use doesn’t support that animation,”
“I didn’t see that state in the file.”

It feels like your work was thrown over a wall, scrambled in transit, and rebuilt by someone looking at a blurry fax of your original design.

Why Both Sides Are Frustrated

• Designers feel like “pixel police,” constantly nagging about spacing and colors, wishing they had the technical vocabulary—or the skills—to fix it themselves.
• Developers receive static pictures of dynamic interfaces. They have to guess how the layout responds to different screen sizes or what happens when data doesn’t load. Every design file looks slightly different, forcing them to write hacky overrides just to get the ticket across the finish line.

The problem isn’t that designers can’t code or that developers lack an eye for design. The problem is that we’re speaking two different languages.

Bridging the Gap

This article is about moving beyond the handoff model and embracing a workflow where design and code share a single source of truth. We’ll explore how to build a design system that isn’t just a Figma sticker sheet, but a production‑ready library that engineers actually trust.

The Traditional Linear Workflow

1. Design happens → stops.
2. Development starts → ships.
3. The handoff is the baton pass.

In modern web development, this model is fundamentally broken.

Why? Because a Figma file is not the truth. It’s a picture of the truth.

In Figma you can:

• Detach an instance.
• Tweak a hex code manually.
• Drag a button two pixels to the right.

All without changing the underlying system. The browser, however, is unforgiving. It demands logic, structure, and systematic rules.

When you treat a design system purely as a design artifact, you run into drift—the live product slowly diverges from the design files because:

• Developers make undocumented decisions.
• Designers make changes that never make it into the code repository.

The result? A codebase full of magic numbers (random pixel values) and a design team that feels its work is being disrespected.

Rethink the Design System

Think of the design system as a product that serves two customers:

1. Designers using it to prototype.
2. Developers using it to ship features.

Introducing Design Engineering

You don’t need to be a full‑stack engineer, but you do need to understand how UI gets to the browser.

Blueprint for Turning a Static Library into a Functional System

1. Establish a Shared Vocabulary

• Current state:

  • A color is just a hex code.
  • #0052CC = “Primary Blue” (designer) vs. a string of characters (developer).

• Problem:

  • If you darken that blue next month, the developer must find‑and‑replace every instance of the hex code—easy to miss, leading to inconsistency.

• Solution – Design Tokens:

  • Assign semantic names to values.
  • Example: color-action-primary, spacing-md.

Result: Edit a value in Figma → a script automatically updates CSS variables or JSON files in the code repository.
Shift: Stop designing with raw values; design with intent (e.g., “standard container spacing” instead of “16 px padding”).

2. Align Design & Code Structures

• Friction point: Designers think in “screens,” developers think in “components.”

• Example:

  • Designer creates a User Profile Card.
  • Developer sees an Avatar, Typography, Button variant, and Container.

• Problem:

  • Figma button component has a property “Type” (Primary/Secondary).
  • React component expects a prop variant (filled/outlined).

• Solution: Align the API (Application Programming Interface).

  • Designers structure variants to match React props.
  • Developers build components flexible enough to handle designer intent without overrides.

Shift: Designers learn to mirror code naming; developers expose clear, consistent props.

3. Documentation Where Developers Work

Most design system docs end up as a graveyard (PDFs or stale Confluence pages).
Good documentation lives where developers work—e.g., Storybook.

• View coded components in isolation.
• Single source of truth for what the component actually does in the browser.
• Docs generated from code can’t lie; deprecated props disappear automatically.

For designers: Contribute to documentation in Markdown (or MDX) alongside the component stories.

Putting It All Together

1. Create a token pipeline that syncs Figma → code.
2. Structure Figma files to reflect the component hierarchy and naming used in the codebase.
3. Document components in Storybook, using Markdown/MDX for design notes, usage guidelines, and visual examples.
4. Iterate collaboratively: designers tweak tokens in Figma; developers see changes reflected instantly in the live component library.

When design and code share the same source of truth, the “hand‑off” becomes a hand‑on collaboration, and the gap between designers and developers narrows dramatically.

Why MDX Is a Super‑Power

MDX lets you write usage guidelines (e.g., “Do not use the primary button more than once per page”) right next to the code example that developers copy.

The Designer’s Fear: Git, Terminals, & Versioning

• Figma has version history, but it’s often chaotic.
• Git provides a structured way to propose changes, review them, and merge them.

Imagine This Workflow

1. A designer wants to update an icon set.
2. Instead of sending a ZIP file, they create a branch in the system.
3. They update the assets and submit a pull request.
4. The developer reviews it, automated tests run, and the change merges.

This is governance. It answers:

• Who is allowed to change the system?
• How do we version it so we don’t break old products?
• How do we communicate changes?

The Shift

From “I updated the Figma file, hope you see it” → “I released v1.2.0 of the system.”

If you’re a designer thinking, “I signed up to design, not to write JSON and manage Git branches,” that’s a fair concern.

The Industry Is Moving

The most valuable designers today can bridge the gap between design and engineering. They’re often called:

• Design Engineers
• Design Systems Leads

When you understand how the frontend works, you stop designing things that are impossible or expensive to build. You start designing systems that scale, gaining engineers’ respect because you’re delivering solutions—not just pictures.

This expertise separates a mid‑level designer from a senior or staff designer.
It’s the difference between earning $85 k and $130 k+.

For Front‑End Developers

Mastering this side of the equation is equally powerful:

• You stop being a “ticket taker.”
• You become a partner in the product process.
• You can catch UX issues before writing a single line of code because you understand the design intent.
• You become the engineer designers love to work with.

Introducing the Course

From Figma to Production: Building Design Systems That Developers Actually Use

I created this course after seeing the same disconnect in team after team. It’s not just about making pretty components in Figma or writing React components—it’s about the glue that holds them together.

What You’ll Do in 6 Weeks

Outcome: By the end you’ll have a published npm package, a documentation site, and a portfolio piece that tells hiring managers, “I don’t just design mockups. I ship systems.”

Who This Is For

1. The Frustrated Product Designer – wants to understand why decisions are made, create intuitive component APIs, and transition into a design‑engineer role.
2. The Design‑Curious Front‑End Developer – wants to learn the design side of things, speak the same language as designers, and become a true partner in product development.

Why It Matters

The gap between design and development is where:

• Products die
• Bugs are born
• Timelines blow up
• Teams burn out

But it’s also the biggest career opportunity.

If you become the person who builds the bridge—who understands tokens, governance, and component architecture—you become indispensable. You stop fighting with tools and teammates and start building things that look and work exactly as intended.

Ready to Stop Throwing Designs Over the Wall?

Let’s build something real together.

Enroll now:
From Figma to Production: Building Design Systems That Developers Actually Use → (link to enrollment)