CopyRight- Copywriting Collaboration Concept for Figma’s New API
Yesterday was a monumental day for the digital product design industry. Figma took a giant leap forward by announcing its API platform- making it the first design tool to do so, and opening up a world of possibilities in the process (congrats to Dylan Field and team!) As my head was spinning with ideas to optimize my team’s workflow, I was struck by a particular problem I’ve encountered in every organization: how do we get copywriters and designers on the same page?
Copywriting has been vastly neglected when it comes to tooling and collaborating, leaving writers reliant on comments and word documents as primary means to communicate with designers. While writers can jump in Figma and manipulate text directly, as designs increase in complexity, so does the learning curve to navigate inside of components and nested layers without messing something up accidentally. Then there’s the problem of synchronized fonts, which writers might not have installed on their local machine (global fonts would be a great addition to Figma btw.)
I wondered…
What if copywriters could manipulate copy in a simple interface that previews their changes in real time, then push them to Figma?
The Workflow
- Designers create text components in Figma with defined font, size, line height, etc.
- The components are designated (ex: naming convention) to be handed off to writers.
- Designated components are imported in CopyRight in the form of input text fields, ready for writers to experiment with copy.
- As writers try out different copy, they can preview it live in its final form with the predefined font characteristics.
- All changes can be saved directly to Figma.
Would love to hear any ideas or suggestions, along with any interested collaborators to bring the project to life once the write API is released.
