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The Art of Design Spec'ing(mahdif.com)

over 1 year ago from Mahdi Farra

  • Robert GrazioliRobert Grazioli, over 1 year ago

    I too would love to see more examples of this done in the wild. I'd gather that the combination of inspect tools, prototypes, and variants in tools like Figma started to reduce the need for these. I stopped doing them back in like 2012 haha. They can be extremely time consuming. But I've always worked very closely with developers so handoffs were less async.

    A workflow that's always worked well for me personally was to just contribute to the frontend implementation. You're writing CSS in your spec here, why not write it in the actual codebase?

    I'm not sure that's a good idea or sustainable, but it's always allowed the developers I work with to focus on the logic and functionality while I can just ensure it's implemented correctly and design around edge cases as I confront them.

    Anyways, nice post.

    p.s. https://farts.link/ .... hilarious

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    • Mahdi FarraMahdi Farra, over 1 year ago

      I've updated the article and added 3 examples for recent projects I worked on.

      You're right that new tools like Figma reduces the need for some specs. However, a lot of the design details such as relative widths/heights can't be inspected automatically in these tools. You'll still need to spec those manually.

      And I totally agree with you on contributing to the codebase, which is what I do when I have the time. However, most of the time it can be challenging to do that on top of my product design duties.

      Thanks a lot for your comment and feedback, and for sharing your workflow as well. Very insightful.

      Glad you liked farts.link haha. Happy pranking!

      0 points