Meet Specify, a company that is working to create a single language for Figma and GitHub. For your design tokens and assets, Specify serves as a central repository and API. Designers can, in other words, update conventional Figma files, and the changes will be reflected in GitHub repositories. Eurazeo led a $4.6 million (€4 million) venture investment for the firm. In addition, Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund, 360 Capital, and Seedcamp are taking part. Clément Vouillon and Didier Forest are two business angels that have invested in the company.
When companies begin to take design seriously, they seek to build a design system that includes a consistent style for buttons, icons, typefaces, logos, colors, and other elements. On Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Pinterest, for example, the login screen looks radically different. Nonetheless, for both designers and developers, it is frequently a manual procedure. Designers use Confluence or Notion to generate documentation pages with design tokens and assets. Developers must then manually review the documentation to ensure that they are using the most up-to-date pieces.
Specify serves as a central storage location for your design assets and tokens. Specify is first connected to one or more sources, as well as one or more destinations. You can, for example, immediately retrieve data and information from Figma files. Designers can make changes in Figma, and the changes will appear in the Specify repository. Specify serves as the sole source of information.
However, modifications to your application can happen more quickly. Specify can automatically create a pull request on GitHub when something is changed — there’s even a command-line interface. Changes can be accepted with a single click by developers. Colors, logos, typefaces, and other elements can be updated without having to do any manual effort.
Specify isn’t interested in limiting its offering to Figma and GitHub. More data sources, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, will be added in the future. And, like Notion, Specify will be able to update additional locations. The ability to apply a single design update to several locations could be especially beneficial. The product’s vision is unmistakable. Specify aspires to be the glue that holds design teams together. “We believe our product to be pretty similar to Segment in terms of strategy,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Chrétien told me.
