Why We Design in Figma and Finish in Tailwind

For years the end of a project looked the same: a tidy Figma file, a call to walk through it, and a slow realisation over the next six weeks that what shipped was a cover version of what we drew. So we stopped handing off.

The handoff is where the design goes to die

Not because engineers are careless — because a static file cannot answer questions. What happens at 900px? What does this do while it loads? What if the name is forty characters? A Figma frame answers none of that, so every one of those decisions gets made again, quickly, by someone who was not in the room when the first one was made.

Multiply that by a few hundred small decisions and you get a site that is recognisably the design, and unmistakably not it.

Figma is for deciding. Tailwind is for building.

We still design in Figma, because it is the fastest place on earth to be wrong. Ten directions in an afternoon, thrown away by dinner. That is the job.

But once a direction is real, we stop drawing it and start building it. The design system lands as tokens and components, not as a page of specs:

• Type, spacing, and colour become theme variables — one source, not a swatch to eyeball
• Components ship as markup your team already knows how to read
• The edge cases get decided while we are still the ones holding them

Your engineers get components, not screenshots — and the handoff meeting stops being a negotiation.

What actually changed

Three things, consistently. Launches got faster, because the last mile was already walked. Reviews got calmer, because we were arguing about the real thing in a real browser instead of about a picture of it. And the work stopped drifting after we left, because the rules lived in the codebase rather than in our heads.

The catch

It only works if the designers can actually write the markup. That is a hiring constraint, not a process one, and it is the main reason we have stayed four people. A design engineer who can take a direction from sketch to production is rare, and worth more than three of anything else.