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ion design

Instantly converts designs into clean code

ion design is building a new layer on the software development stack, automating front-end engineering through a design system and code generation. We started with a pipeline that automatically converts Figma designs into clean React code that's tailor-fitted to the customer codebase. We re-use your existing components and variables from your codebase in our generations and can automatically generate PRs and merge conflicts from Figma.

ion design
Founded:2023
Team Size:2
Location:San Francisco
Group Partner:Dalton Caldwell

Active Founders

Samraaj Bath

Samraaj is the co-founder and CEO of ion design. Samraaj is a 2x YC founder and was previously a CTO, a product manager at an early stage startup, a design team manager, a full stack engineer. He's committed to making it easier to build beautiful products. Samraaj also previously founded an artisan ice cream company, bootstrapped a birthday wishing business, danced professionally, and rebuilt a 1981 motorcycle.

Samraaj Bath
Samraaj Bath
ion design

Samuel Barnholdt

Fullstack engineer & startup enthusiast. Failed to become the next Swedish House Mafia and turned to coding. Currently making your engineering cycles shorter and your codebase more consistent, one generation at a time.

Samuel Barnholdt
Samuel Barnholdt
ion design

Company Launches

Hi everyone 👋🏽🧡. Samraaj and Samuel here from ion design. We’re super excited to share what we’ve been working on with you!

tldr:

ion design automatically turns Figma designs into pixel-perfect, production-ready code, speeding up front-end implementation time by at least 40%.

We accomplish this by serving a fully featured Figma design system and matching React component library. This allows our generations to come out with incredibly high-quality, functional code that saves hours of time.

Think of us like UntitledUI and Shadcn on steroids - we speed up both the design and implementation processes.

Deal:

Our design system with 5,000+ custom components is available for just $10 for the first 100 customers - get access here

Here’s a quick demo of our design system being used to generate a production-ready application:

DEMO

Demo Application - Figma

Demo Application - GitHub

Demo Application - Live Link

The Problem - implementing designs is expensive, painful, and monotonous.

Design and front-end engineering is re-doing the same work twice. We think this is ridiculous, and a total waste of time for businesses that leads to a multitude of problems:

  • Engineers feel like they are wasting their time monotonously writing CSS to match pixels in Figma. They would prefer to focus on more interesting work that drives value - like business logic, architecture, and data. They also hate working with primitives and want useable components out-of-the-box.
  • Designers feel that there’s always a disconnect between what they made and production. They’re constrained by engineering bottlenecks and their fixes will never be live. Many want a system they can put in place so the organization can be more structured and consistent.
  • PMs & Founders hate having to prioritize design changes against product iterations and new feature releases. They wish that the design work could just get done.

⚡ Solution - The ion system

ion serves a customizable design system & component library that can be synced with your codebase ✨automatically✨.

We’re the first UI-kit that’s tightly coupled between Figma and React and works with out-of-the-box code generation.

Here are some killer features:

  • ion automatically re-uses your existing components and writes READABLE code that your engineers can interface with.
  • ion writes stub functions and state handlers for your buttons, inputs, text areas, tabs, and other complicated components, automatically.
  • ion raises merge conflicts for design changes and soon will be able to create pull requests directly in your repo.
  • ion keeps you consistent, clean, and quick in your development. Oftentimes, the generated code is cleaner and easier to work with than what I write.

Using ion also saves your designers thousands of hours by serving 5,000+ well-built Figma components. This empowers you to design faster and maintain consistency across your application. Here’s a gif of me creating a screen in a matter of minutes:

Our design system is endlessly theme-able and syncs directly with the CSS variables in your codebase. Light mode and dark mode are baked into the system.

Say goodbye to re-writing classnames and pulling your hair out to get things to look good. You can even add whatever custom themes you want.

💲 Special Deal

  • JUST $10 for access to our design system with 5,000+ Figma components and the matching React+tailwind code. Ready to go for any project - get started here.
  • Personal hands-on help from our team to use the design system and integrate generated code for you.

Sign up for early access here.

or - book a call with me directly here.

Selected answers from ion design's original YC application for the W24 Batch

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

Ion automatically converts Figma designs into clean react code to speed up front-end engineers.

How it works: Ion plugs into existing engineering workflows through a VSCode extension and, given the context, learns from the codebase to write the best possible code. Ion also wraps existing design systems to generate modular pieces that are easy to modify and integrate.

Ion enables designers to change designs that have already been implemented and automatically shoot out PRs to update the code. This removes significant engineering work and allows the engineers to review rather than write design fixes from scratch. We retain pre-existing changes to the code, so the design changes don’t mess with written logic.

Benefit to team: Engineers view design implementation as rote, monotonous work. So Ion automates that part and allows them to focus on the more interesting aspects that actually drive value - like business logic, front end architecture, and asynchronous data.