

Both our engineering team and design team utilize open source libraries, frameworks, and resources often.

Making these tools available to everyoneĪt Discord, we believe in open source. Enter Auto ThemeĪuto Theme is a Figma plugin we created to automatically theme designs.

This type of work was precisely the type of work we could solve with our own design tool. Replacing copy in multiple text fields at the same time, selecting all instances of a layer, or in our case creating two versions of every design.Įarlier I mentioned how we needed to create a light and dark theme version of every design we made. How you and your design team can utilize these tools today (yay for open source)!ĭesign tooling can automate the menial and repetitive tasks you do dozens of times a day.The methodology and thinking we used while creating these tools.The problems we wanted to solve through design tooling.Fostering the design tooling community so people can build off of what we’ve started.Improving the developer/designer handoff process.Less time spent doing repetitive tasks and more time focusing on more important parts of our jobs.For us, the benefits of design tooling are: Since then, this question has become a critical part of our process. We asked ourselves “ Could we build a tool to help us?” Spoiler alert we could, we did, and it rules. This is when the design tooling spark ignited. Creating double of the design artifacts was time-consuming but necessary. In order to guarantee our new color mapping was working, we needed to design every new feature in both themes. Neither theme was passing our accessibility bar and so we were working hard to address it. With the release of the Figma plugin API last year, the design team at Discord saw an exciting opportunity.Īround the same time as the Figma plugin beta, we were working hard on improving the accessibility of our dark and light themes.
