In tools like Sketch and Figma you're digging for the underlying visual rules, one "component" or layer can have a ton of variations, and I can quickly compare and compose them side by side on a canvas. You build an evolving system to build design systems from.
In code you're implementing the version or composition that made it, one composition. Unless you can move, juggle and manipulate items as convenient as in design tools, exploring compositions with code is a much lesser experience for a designer, even if he can code.
Showcase:
Demos:
Happy to answer questions.
It is an object model based solution so it does take some getting used to...basically imagine your vue/react application constructed as an object model, the product provides a UI environment for creating and manipulating that model.
Of course there is always room for improving the workflow so what you see today is definitely not what we envision the final state to be. What we are really excited about is the underlying tech which is going to allow different UI based solutions.
There’s a lot of activity in the Sketch/Figma/whatever to React space at the moment, including Hadron [0], Alva [1] and Lona [2].
There’s a real gap in the workflow between design - basically a drawing - and working code. Handoff tools like Zeplin help, but it seems redundant to build everything twice, first in a design and prototyping tool, then again in working code.
However I’m not sure where these tools fit in, as a team that uses React in production would have the skills - and would probably prefer - to dive in with code, rather than use the output of a code generator.
It’s meant to make things easier, but the tech is so complicated it’s way out of reach of those who might actually benefit from it.
[0] https://hadron.app
[1] https://meetalva.io
[2] https://github.com/airbnb/Lona