The Story of Open Design | Avocode Blog
Open Design is a developer toolkit that allows you to read and display data from designs using code. Though Open Design was first released in early 2021, the technology behind it has been powering Avocode's design handoff tool for six years. This is the story of how it all came to be.
Back in 2014, there was a lot of pain involved with designers handing off UI designs to developers. Many designers were still using Photoshop and developers didn't have a great way to get what they needed from those designs.
Avocode 1.0 was released to address those problems. At launch, it targeted teams using Photoshop and we started hearing that they saw their design → code process get faster and more accurate. It was a success!
After our launch, we listened closely to feedback from our customers. We also did some UX testing with our designer and developer friends in Prague to learn more about the pain points in the design handoff workflow.
In the middle of 2016, we turned this feedback into an action plan. We focused our entire engineering team on building two interconnected features:
