Streamline your design system processes with Coda + Figma

How to document, maintain, and collaborate on your design system from a single place, using Coda and Figma variables.

Jasmine Jones

Product Designer at Coda

Streamline your design system processes with Coda + Figma

By Jasmine Jones

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Engineering · 5 min read
Building great products hinges on the seamless collaboration between design and engineering. But staying in sync when you’re working in different tools—as these two teams often are—can be a messy and manual task, with a high risk of details slipping through the cracks. One way to bridge this divide is by using Coda for your design system documentation, so we’ve created a template to help you do just that. And, with our new Figma variables sync feature, it’s now even easier to maintain your design system documentation. In this post, I’ll walk you through how the template can help you improve collaboration, enhance transparency, and streamline your handoffs.

Document and track in a single place.

 In case you’re not familiar, Coda is an all-in-one workspace that blends the flexibility and familiarity of docs with the structure of spreadsheets. It’s integrated with your other tools and enhanced with automations and AI. All of this makes it the perfect solution for design system documentation. With Coda, you can not only document all of your components, but do so within the structure of a database, making it really easy to search. You can also completely customize your documentation by creating tailored views and embedding additional component information, like Figma comments, data from Storybook, or other engineering resources. Here's our design system template so you can see what this looks like in action.
The best thing about using Coda for your documentation is that you can also track your tasks alongside your components, meaning everything is managed in a single place. When something needs updating, you can create a task and tag the individual components it relates to, so everyone can see what’s in progress or in the backlog. When tasks are marked done, they’re automatically added to a change log and version history, creating a source of truth for what’s changed and when. This is helpful for your design systems team, but also enhances transparency for other teams too.
And, rather than make those changes twice—in Figma and your documentation—you can sync your Figma variables into Coda and have updates logged automatically.

Manage your Figma variables from Coda.

 In case you’re not already using variables in Figma, here’s a quick rundown: Variables are values, like colors or numbers, that can change depending on the context of a design, such as mobile and desktop versions.They save time and effort when building and updating designs, and also help ensure your designs stay consistent—when you update the value of a variable, designs across files can be updated accordingly. With our Figma Pack, you can pull in all of your Figma variable data into Coda, making it easy to add them into your design system documentation. You can create different views of different collections, such as color foundations or spacing, and customize them to display the information you care about. Hovering over each variable provides a preview, and you can open it up to see more details. Coda also pulls in your aliases from Figma.
Data is synced both ways, so you can make edits to variables in Coda and have them automatically update in Figma, and vice versa. Maintaining your design system documentation has never been so easy!

Simplify your engineering handoffs.

 Coda doesn’t only help with easy maintenance of your design system—it streamlines your engineering handoffs too. Often, engineers have to jump in and out of Figma to communicate with designers directly, but are doing much of their work in other tools like GitHub, Jira, and Slack. Important information ends up scattered across apps, so key details can get overlooked. Using Coda for our design system documentation has greatly reduced this risk, in particular due to two features: Packs, and automations. Packs are Coda’s integrations with other tools, like Slack and Github (and 500+ others!), and automations enable you to take the manual work out of repetitive tasks. These come together to connect workflows across tools, streamlining the handoff between designers and engineers. For example, when I make a change to a variable, an automation is triggered to notify our #design-system channel on Slack. Engineers are immediately aware that a variable has been updated, and can quickly see in Coda what’s changed.
Our engineers also built a handy code verification tab that pulls in data from GitHub, enabling them to quickly see any discrepancies between their code in GitHub and the design system. Then, they can simply copy the new value, update their code, and refresh the dashboard to check it has updated successfully.
Coda is completely customizable, so you can tailor your design system documentation with whatever automations and Packs make sense for your team, depending what tools you’re using and your current workflows.

Enhance your design system with AI.

 One final benefit I want to highlight about using Coda for your design system documentation is that it gives you the power of Coda’s other features, like Coda AI. An example our Software Engineer Bharat Batra likes to show off is using Coda AI to generate new themes that you can then apply to your design system, like a holiday or Valentine’s color palette. Simply generate the theme and then apply to your Figma files automatically—magic!

Try it out for yourself.

 Coda has really leveled up our design system documentation, and we hope it will for your team, too. By integrating live variable data and connecting workflows across your other tools, Coda not only allows you to document your system, but also track tasks and centralize cross functional work, making designer-to-develop handoffs smoother than ever. Now, your teams can stay aligned while still being able to work in their preferred tools. There are plenty of ways to get started using Figma variables in Coda. Jump in using this template, watch an on-demand webinar to see it in action, or contact our sales team to get more information.
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