Design Tooling

As the creator of several Figma plugins, I believe tools can enable us to spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time focusing on our craft.

About

The design tool Figma, released a plugin API back in 2019. Since then, I’ve built a handful of tools to help improve our design workflow at Discord and made these plugins open source to the larger community.

I built a tool for us to automatically theme designs called Auto Theme, a design linter called Design Lint, and a tool to automatically generate a title page called Table of Contents.

I’ve written articles on this topic, released open source files on how to build your own tools, and did a live stream talk with some of the folks over at Figma in early 2021. In August of 2021, I was Figma's "Featured Creator" in the community newsletter.

• “Building Open Source Design Tooling at Discord”
• Design Lint landing page
• View all our open source rescouces at figma.com/@discord

Design Lint

One of my most popular plugins, Design Lint has been downloaded 30,000+ times and has been used as a foundation for custom design linters at some of the world’s largest tech companies like Twitter and Lyft.

Common issues with developer handoff are missing design tokens, using the wrong colors for specific layers, and introducing styles that aren’t part of a design system. Design Lint flags these errors in order to make the handoff process less prone to issues.

Auto Theme

Another plugin I built for our team automatically changes a designs themes from light to dark, or vice versa, using our design system colors.

This let’s us create designs in either theme in seconds. Since it’s such a common use case for designers, I open sourced the plugin for other teams to build off of.

Create Sticky Note

While managing design on the Discord growth team, I've found myself conducting a lot more brainstorms. As a team that uses Figjam often, I created a utility to convert notes written before meetings and text layers into sticky notes automatically.

Open Source

I’m a huge believer in the open source community. I’ve utilized countless open source libraries in the past when building software and projects of my own. As one way to contribute back to the community, all the tools I’ve built are open source and documented on Github.

I'll continue making open source tools as soon as I come across a new problem worth solving.Follow me on Twitter for my latest work.