Hi Figma!
I’m a developer working with a team creating a design system and React component library. Our designers use tokens for pretty much everything, and a key part of our workflow is exporting the tokens as CSS variables, which can then be used in our React component library.
To do this, we use a community-created plugin called Variables2CSS. It’s fantastic that someone created this plugin (thank you to the author!), but it presents us with one main problem: we need to be in Design Mode in Figma for the export to work correctly. If we’re in developer mode when we use the plugin to export the tokens, some tokens go missing.
This is a problem within my team, as we need to purchase a designer license for each developer who needs to export the tokens. As my employer will only pay for one designer license for this purpose I am stuck being the only developer in my team who is able to do this. It’s a hassle for me, and if I go on holiday, or I’m off sick, the team is stuck and development is delayed.
Additionally, being able to export tokens as CSS variables is such an important part of how we work, it seems strange that it’s not a core feature of Figma. There must be a lot of teams out there with a very similar workflow.
So my feature request has two parts:
- The export of Figma tokens as CSS variables should be a core feature within Figma - we should not need to rely on the goodwill of a single community member for this.
- This feature should be fully functional in developer mode - we should not have to purchase a designer license to do something that is part of the developer workflow.
Thanks!
David.