180 Days Building a Design API
Here’s a recap of what we built this year at Specify and a sneak peek of what’s next.
Time flies!
Since January, we launched in public, raised a $4.6M Seed Round funding, and shipped some significant updates to help design and engineering teams build better products faster.
Here’s a recap of the key highlights and a sneak peek of what’s next 👇
180 Days Building a Design API
Launching in public
We introduced our Design API to the world last February and launched on Product Hunt, reaching #2 Product of the Day.
In the meantime, we announced a €4M ($4.6M) Seed Round funding to build the world’s first Design Data Platform. Our co-founder and CEO, Valentin Chrétien, shared our story and vision in TechCrunch.
We provide organizations with a single connector that automates the collection, storage, and distribution of all design decisions. It’s an exciting time to be designing and building consistent user experiences at scale.
— Valentin Chrétien, co-founder and CEO at Specify
Leveraging knowledge with Design Data Platforms 101
We launched Design Data Platforms 101, our most advanced and complete guide on design tokens and ops, resulting from 5 years of lessons learned in building a Design API.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up a design CI/CD workflow step by step, with insights, best practices, real-world examples, and free resources.
Design Data Platforms 101 is inspired by design leaders from top companies:
- Jina Anne (Google),
- Kaelig (Shopify),
- Chase McCoy (Stripe),
- Danny Banks (Amazon),
- Shaun Bent (Spotify)…
Matthew Ström, Product Design Manager at Stripe, described this guide as:
The periodic table that helps you make sense of your design system.
— Matthew Ström, Product Design Manager at Stripe
If you want to level up your knowledge on design tokens and ops, have a read!
Supercharging your command-line experience
We pushed the developer experience to the next level, introducing a new Command-Line Interface (CLI). New structure, new design, and a better error management system that software developers enjoy using!
Here’s what you can do with the Specify CLI:
- Sync your design tokens and assets:
$ specify sync - Pull your design tokens to a local directory:
$ specify pull
You can install it via NPM or Yarn:
npm install @specifyapp/cli
yarn add @specifyapp/cli
Check out the API Documentation to learn more.
Designing the Specify CLI was definitely an unusual UI exercise. In this blog post, Yann-Edern Gillet shared his lessons learned.
Getting started with Configuration Templates
In June, we introduced Configuration Templates for Tailwind, React, React Native, and more.
They’re ready-to-use examples to help software developers sync design tokens and assets from Figma to GitHub.
Find configuration templates for:
- CSS Custom Properties
- Tailwind
- React
- React Native
- SCSS Variables
- Style Dictionary (Android)
- Style Dictionary (iOS)
Don’t see a template you’re looking for? Feel free to request a template. We’re eager to have your feedback!
Introducing the Raycast Extension for Specify
Lately, we released a Raycast Extension.
It’s a blazingly fast way to search in your Figma files and copy/paste your design data — colors, icons, images.
The Raycast extension is available right now, via the Raycast Store.
Growing the team
Last but not least, we onboarded 2 new members to the SpeciFam!
Welcome home, Alexis and Khalil 🙌 🙌
Kicking off Q3 to a great start
Building the world’s first Design Data Platform is challenging.
Small or more significant contributions, software developers, designers, product managers, or marketers, we’re all committed to making our Design API the best possible dev experience for your product team.
Thanks to all of the makers across teams — Maud, Valentin, Pierre-Antoine, Antoine, Lucho, Allan, Louis, Yann-Edern, Nicolas, Thibaut, Alexis, Khalil, Nathanaël, and Florent.
There’s a lot more on the way
We’re experimenting with new apps, starting with Notion. We really want to ensure we do it right, so we’re taking our time to nail it. #StayTuned
Redesigned CLI, Configuration Templates, in-depth GitHub integration, Raycast extension… If you’re into Design Systems and Ops, you’ll enjoy using Specify.
