Hey everyone, I’ve been experimenting with Plasmic and I’ve got some ideas to share.
First off, Plasmic is awesome. But it’s more than just a typical website or app builder. It can do stuff that other tools like Webflow or Framer can’t, especially when you’re part of a big team working on a large project.
Let me break it down:
Imagine a team that wants to speed up its design and development process. They want to move from tools like Figma to something more comprehensive like Framer or even Webflow. The idea sounds great: draw a prototype, build it, add some extra code stuff with a developer, and launch it all from one place, no more back-and-forth between designers and developers. But when you try to use these tools with existing designs and codes, things can get a bit tricky, sometimes even impossible. And we can’t forget that most of the companies are already running. It’s rare when a company abandons everything and builds everything again inside a new platform like that.
Website builders are becoming more powerful, but they often overlook an important aspect for big teams: design tokens. Right now, if you want to share these design tokens between your design and dev team, it requires a lot of juggling between different tools just to TRY to share the same info in different places (like Figma, coding software, docs, etc).
I’ve been in the design and front-end field for more than 10 years. Surely, there must be a better way to make UI than to draw them and then code them.
So, I think Plasmic can bridge this gap between design and dev. It’s almost there, but here are a few ideas on what could make it even better:
1 - Design Token Support: Plasmic should work with all kinds of design tokens. Right now, it doesn’t include some things like radii (corner roundness). It could be beneficial to organize these tokens as we do with UI Frameworks like Styled-System, ChakraUI, and others.
2 - Syncing: It’s cool that Plasmic tokens can be synced to theo JSON file. But it would be even better if Plasmic allowed a two-way sync with some main tokens files.
3 - More Plugin Power: Plasmic is great at letting developers make new things for the Plasmic editor. But, I think it can do even more. A plugin system that lets us control tools on Plasmic’s canvas (like the margin and padding drag tool) and make custom code templates would be really handy. This could make integrating current code into Plasmic easier.
4 - User Restrictions: It would be awesome if we could set rules about what a user can or can’t do in the editor. For example, I want my team to use only our components, tokens, and data providers. It would be helpful to hide Plasmic’s default components.
That’s it from me for now. I just want to say, Plasmic is amazing, and I’m really excited about its future.