A "welcome" is in order, and let's also set some expectations while we are at it!

An Introduction to Figma, Figmagic, and Design Systems

I hope you are excited! We'll be using some very nice tools and some skeletons I've pre-provided to fast-track our way to a design system!

The course project

Introduction

Let's take care of the essentials first, like setting up a development environment, Git and Node.

Prerequisites

Figma reshaped how millions of people and companies follow the design process. Now, we're going to form our process around it.

An Intro to Figma: Shortcuts, Frames, and Components

Get a spot in the world's biggest (probably!?) JavaScript community—NPM.

How to Set up NPM to Publish JavaScript Packages

Get hooked up with the premier place on the planet to share, build, and discuss code—open source or otherwise.

Setting up GitHub

Next stop is hosting, where we'll use Cloudflare Pages, one of the most exciting tech services around.

Setting up Cloudflare

Last but not least, we need to get our visual inspection platform and Storybook hosting working. For this, we will turn to Chromatic.

Setting up Chromatic

Preparation

Let me introduce you to my take on the concept of "continuous design."

An Intro to Continuous Design: DevOps for Design

Time to set the stage and see what we can do to be a top shop using continuous design principles and tooling.

Build a Continuous Design Workflow With a Design System

A diagram can be the difference between an organization of "petty kings" doing their own thing and having actionable plans built on a shared identity. What we need is some kind of governance.

Build Better Design and Change Governance With Flows

One magic, simple concept (design token) and a one-stop shop to contain our design equal one hell of a powerhouse.

Intro to Design Tokens: How to Communicate in Design Work

Going from static files, private work, and image-based output to a collaborative, real-time component-oriented tool changes everything about the design workflow.

Why Figma? The Pros of Collaborative Design

Figmagic is the last piece in our toolchain that acts as the glue needed to super-charge your productivity.

An Intro to Figmagic, the Figma CLI For Token Design

Enabling 'Continuous Design'

It's high time to get to know the Figma API, one of the real stars of our show.

How to Use the Figma API and Read Figma Documents

Time to get knee-deep in coding, which we will kick-start by using a bit of boilerplate that we're going to scaffold.

How to Scaffold a React Codebase With Degit

It's vital we have a solid grounding for our component workflow if we are to build an entire library of them. In this lesson, we will set up a smooth, component-driven development workflow from code to Storybook.

Build a Component Development Workflow With Storybook

That song with the "I like to move it-move it" lyrics must have been about pushing code to production...right?

Automatically Deploy React Code to GitHub and Cloudflare

While dogfooding does sound yucky, it's a word that connotes the practice of using one's own things, sometimes to build something new. That's what we will do now with the components we've built.

How to Publish a React Component Library to NPM

Putting in the last fixes for our tooling means getting our Continuous Integration operational.

Finishing the CI Setup

Setting up a pipeline for design and code

With all the other hard, boxy stuff behind us, the perspective now moves to the front-end components and Figma.

How to Set up Figmagic to Interact With Figma via CLI

Working effectively with Figmagic means understanding how and what it actually parses from a document.

How Figma Files Are Organized in Figmagic

Getting to know the configuration options is super important if you want to make the best use of Figmagic.

An Intro to Figmagic Command Line Configuration

Getting to know Figmagic

Let's find our way by analyzing our UX sketches before digging into the details and building anything.

UX Sketching and Double Diamonds: Build Atomic Design

Let's move on from basics to the intermediate level and actually make some designs.

How to Create Design Tokens and Styles in Figma

Let's put the Figma-first approach to the test by taking the step to turn a design into code.

How to Break up Designs Into Small, Atomic Components

Starting our design system

And now for some bells and whistles—graphics and icons!

How to Build Icons in Figma and Export Them With Figmagic

Galloping ever onwards, we'll wave our magic wand and summon our low-complexity components.

Flat vs Nested Elements in Figma and Figmagic

Now, we leave the easy flat components for the more detailed nested ones!

How to Create Nested Figma Elements in Figmagic

Code generation with Figmagic 4 will only take you so far. For our most important and complicated components, we will need to do some manual work, composing small bits into more advanced ones. Let's compose one from what we've made so far!

How to Compose Complex Components With Figmagic

Extra credit time—adding the components for the checkout view.

Finishing the Checkout Components (optional)

Building elements and components

Good documentation is vital and shows that you care about your design system and those who will use it. Lacking good documentation practices could spell doom for a design system.

How to Author Quality Design Documentation

The very first documentation step we will take is to describe what we have built so far.

Add Storybook Descriptions For Self-Documenting Designs

Storybook is a brilliant tool for documentation, and we'll make good use of it in several ways.

How to Structure Storybook for Documentation

Documentation and Storybook

We have talked about "continuity" a lot, so it's about time we address how to deal with change in practice.

How to Plan for Design and Component Life Cycles

Things need to be in order before we continue.

Export Components With GitHub Chromatic Actions

Time to fill up our UI platform with our work to date!

A Beginner's Guide to Using Chromatic With Storybook

Communicating and giving feedback on our work is the lifeblood of a design system.

Building a Feedback Loop For Your Design System

Let's automate the release of new components.

Publish New Design Components With GitHub Actions

Time to place the final cherry on the top. Cue up "I've got the power"!

How to Trigger GitHub Actions From a Figma Plugin

The design life cycle

Summary and thank you

Among developers and architects, "continuous integration and delivery/deployment" (CI/CD for short) has increasingly become the norm for almost two decades. And while frontend development has gone through the framework revolution, going from design to code with the speed expected of CI/CD is still a pain. But it doesn't need to be!

This 10-module course is taught by Mikael Vesavuori, an architect and developer who has helped companies like Polestar redefine their technology and design processes, tooling and ways of working.

In the course, we will create a full component-based React-driven application with Figmagic, underpinned by Storybook, good documentation, and with CI and automated testing.

We will bring the dev-designer collaboration to its current state-of-the-art with a DevOps-inspired life cycle, which could be called “continuous design” (after continuous integration/deployment or CI/CD).

While there is a pre-defined, specific toolset that we’ll use, the end goal of the course is to teach you a wider perspective of what it means to work end-to-end with design systems. Nearly all individual tools are exchangeable: we’re more interested in the capabilities enabling our desired way-of-working than the specific tools chosen to get there.

This course is a comprehensive guide to building a React component library based on a well-architectured design system. You’ll create a full component-based React-driven application with Figmagic, underpinned by Storybook, good documentation, and with CI and automated testing. Learn senior-level system architecture skills for frontend React code; skills you can apply broadly in working on any frontend application.

The newline Guide to React Component Design Systems with Figmagic

How to set up a continuous design pipeline from code to CI/CD, using some of the best services out there

What Figma, Figmagic, and design tokens are and how they enable you to be more productive

How design tokens can function as a contract between designers and developers, setting up powerful new ways of working

The history of design/code tooling and how to argue for process and tooling change

Understand the value of documentation, using Storybook and Figma to document your work

In the last lesson, we created a product card component using our design tokens page while storing many of these token values in Figma's styles. The workflow demonstrated using a stable basis of design tokens that we made explicit together with their styles, and then we iterated and built on a simple component with these, refining tokens and the actual design as we went along.

This module will deal with how we generate code from our design. More specifically, we will focus most of our attention on the React code generation and spend less time on the other files as those are more straightforward.

For this lesson, I hope you are ready for a bit of a longer session since we'll:

We'll have ended up with a more granular Figma design ready to build UI kits from, and we'll have actual code for the product card. Sweet!

Disassembling a design into smaller elements

Okay, time to work. I want us to go back to the 

We used a frame to contain the area of the component. In the frame, we have a top-to-bottom sorting of the individual pieces that shape the entirety of the card. This "architecture" of sorts is very simple at the moment. However, because it's not been made into a component within Figma, it's not reusable; you'd have to copy-paste it everywhere, and nothing would stay in sync except your styles.

Further, if you put on your "front-end developer glasses," notice that there is nothing particularly reusable about the internals either. For example, the heading is just a text snippet. If this were React, wouldn't we want to have some kind of component for that? Same story for the other parts—we can easily improve this situation, so let's do just that.

For each of the internal parts (Image, Heading...), select them and press 

 to make them into components, one by one. With that done, all the internals can now be reused on their own. Do remember that the ones out in the work area are the "master" components! You can see this with the four-piece diamond icon.

Lastly, make the frame itself into a component. You'll see that Figma understood that the internal parts of the ProductCard were instances of the components you broke out into, so the "full" component just references those instances.

You will need to adjust the layer stacking that Figma just created for you a bit so that it has the same order.

One final fix: Turn off "clip content" for the ProductCard component. This makes the shadow comes across, even if it's in the layer named 

Naming is hard, and if in doubt, give contextual names


For this course, the scope is very limited, but I guess you can see how a component called 

 will quickly be contested. How do you know if it's a page heading or a product heading...? Is it contextually specific or not...? Many questions that a simple name does not solve. Therefore—unless you are in such a highly contained environment like we are in here, where you aren't creating any issues by naming things poorly—make sure to give good, proper, contextual names.

) your new small components (so, all of them except the big 

Okay, so that's all good with Figma then. But what about Figmagic? Once again, it can't currently handle components that are this complex, composed out of many other components. What it can do, though, is use the more granular ones we just extracted.

---
title: How to Break up Designs Into Small, Atomic Components
description: Let's put the Figma-first approach to the test by taking the step to turn a design into code.
#privateVideoUrl: https://fullstack.wistia.com/media/xxxxx
isPublicLesson: false
useMdx: true
---

In the last lesson, we created a product card component using our design tokens page while storing many of these token values in Figma's styles. The workflow demonstrated using a stable basis of design tokens that we made explicit together with their styles, and then we iterated and built on a simple component with these, refining tokens and the actual design as we went along.

This module will deal with how we generate code from our design. More specifically, we will focus most of our attention on the React code generation and spend less time on the other files as those are more straightforward.

For this lesson, I hope you are ready for a bit of a longer session since we'll:

-   Go full circle from the previous design, taking it apart into smaller components that (soon) can be generated into code
-   Learn more about optimum ways to set up our work in Figma for Figmagic
-   Create redlines to communicate non-visual aspects of our design

We'll have ended up with a more granular Figma design ready to build UI kits from, and we'll have actual code for the product card. Sweet!

## Disassembling a design into smaller elements

Okay, time to work. I want us to go back to the **ProductCard** component we made in the last lesson.

We used a frame to contain the area of the component. In the frame, we have a top-to-bottom sorting of the individual pieces that shape the entirety of the card. This "architecture" of sorts is very simple at the moment. However, because it's not been made into a component within Figma, it's not reusable; you'd have to copy-paste it everywhere, and nothing would stay in sync except your styles.

![ProductCard component, original](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-react-component-design-systems-with-figmagic/module_06/lesson_06.03/public/assets/card-original.png)

Further, if you put on your "front-end developer glasses," notice that there is nothing particularly reusable about the internals either. For example, the heading is just a text snippet. If this were React, wouldn't we want to have some kind of component for that? Same story for the other parts—we can easily improve this situation, so let's do just that.

### Making components from the internals

For each of the internal parts (Image, Heading...), select them and press `CMD + OPT + K` to make them into components, one by one. With that done, all the internals can now be reused on their own. Do remember that the ones out in the work area are the "master" components! You can see this with the four-piece diamond icon.

![ProductCard component, breaking up into components](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-react-component-design-systems-with-figmagic/module_06/lesson_06.03/public/assets/card-breakup-components-1.png)

Lastly, make the frame itself into a component. You'll see that Figma understood that the internal parts of the ProductCard were instances of the components you broke out into, so the "full" component just references those instances.

:::info
You will need to adjust the layer stacking that Figma just created for you a bit so that it has the same order.
:::

![ProductCard component, completely broken up into components](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-react-component-design-systems-with-figmagic/module_06/lesson_06.03/public/assets/card-breakup-components-2.png)

One final fix: Turn off "clip content" for the ProductCard component. This makes the shadow comes across, even if it's in the layer named **Card**.

![Turning off "clip content" for the ProductCard component](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-react-component-design-systems-with-figmagic/module_06/lesson_06.03/public/assets/no-clip-content.png)

:::tip
**Naming is hard, and if in doubt, give contextual names**
For this course, the scope is very limited, but I guess you can see how a component called **Heading** will quickly be contested. How do you know if it's a page heading or a product heading...? Is it contextually specific or not...? Many questions that a simple name does not solve. Therefore—unless you are in such a highly contained environment like we are in here, where you aren't creating any issues by naming things poorly—make sure to give good, proper, contextual names.
:::