The handoff is where good designs go to die
Why I stopped handing designs over and started carrying them across, and what changed when the designer and the engineer were the same person.
- process
- design systems
Every team I’ve worked with has a version of the same story. The design is approved, the tickets are written, and three weeks later what ships is close. The spacing is a little off, the empty state was never designed, and the error message reads “Something went wrong.”
None of that is anyone’s fault. It’s what a handoff does. Information gets lost every time work changes hands.
Carry it, don’t hand it
When I design something I’m also going to build, a few things change:
- I design the states, not just the screens. Loading, empty, error and “you have 400 of these” all get drawn, because I know I’ll have to write them.
- Tokens come first. If the color is
--c-accentin Figma, it’s--c-accentin CSS. There’s no translation step to get wrong. - I prototype the hard bits in code. Anything involving motion, real data or a slow network gets built early, because a static mockup lies about those.
It’s not about doing everything yourself
On a bigger team I’m not the only designer or the only engineer, and that’s fine. The point is that someone holds the whole thing in their head from research to release. That’s the role I try to play.