Death to the Template — Converting Figma to React

It’s time to kill the design template. Hear me out…

As a UI/UX designer, I’ve always struggled with the fact that my designs were merely a starting point or blueprint for someone else building it. Most designers have settled for the concept that things will end up being ‘good enough’ or ‘lost in translation’…

So on the flip side, in order to get that pixel perfect, beautiful looking product or website, teams increasingly look towards templates. Is this because their designer isn’t good enough? Well sometimes yes, but often times it is because that templated design means a predictable outcome. Designing inside the lines gains the benefit of knowing it will be way easier to build. This idea applies to many nocode, drag and drop WYSIWYG editors as well as frameworks such as Tailwind CSS. Medium, as an example, both benefits and suffers from this. We know it will look good. We also know it will look the same as everyone else.

So basically, if you want a truly unique product, that stands out from the crowd, you need to either have a stellar, large design and devolper team or hire an agency to build your unique vision. The vision of your design team will almost certainly far exceed the project timeline or capabilities of even a super talented development team. But users/customers are expecting more than ever. Trust in your brand and/or product is closely linked to their first visual impression. Is is beautiful? Is it unique?

So as a designer myself, that visual asperation is always untethered to capaibilities. You want to design the most impressive product you can envision. Modern UI/UX is usually a process of scaling back from the ideal to what is possible, hoping that there’s a middle ground. As a designer, I can tell you, this process sucks. It’s gut-wrenching pretty much every time, and you start to train yourself to stop designing what’s beautiful and start designing what’s possible. This is the big the difference between a senior and junior UI/UX designer: Seniors scope their designs down.

This is what drove me to build Quest. I want everyone on the team to be seen as equally valuable and their contributions to become part of the final product. I want to empower designers to become not just the visionaries, but an integral part of the build process. Where their designs are the source of truth and not a placeholder for what’s to come.

With Quest, you can simply convert your Figma designs into React products. Your design becomes the product. Designing becomes building. Enough with the ‘good enough’…