We are an open-source platform for software engineers to manage their UI's theme directly in code.
Hello everyone, we are Alex and Teddy, and we love making beautiful websites!
Alex (left) was as a UI engineer at Liveramp and Teddy (right) worked on the web team at Robinhood π. We then worked together as the first product engineers at a YC startup. At each of these companies, we consumed, contributed, and documented design systems.
The key to consistently beautiful user experiences is design systems: a collection of reusable components and styling standards.
Design systems also speed up development β even at startups! One test suggests itβs 47% faster to build a simple form using a design system. It's useful for engineers, designers, and especially your customers if there isn't a random color for each button in your app.
But design systems are hard to get right. Picking an out-of-the-box solution is easy to start with, but sooner than later, you run into limitations and need to do a months-long migration. On the other hand, starting from scratch is technically difficult and time-consuming.
They're also hard to maintain. Product development often moves faster than the design system itself. Design system solutions today are bloated and introduce unnecessary friction into the product development lifecycle.
Exhibit A: Twitter thread on Linear's simple but efficient design system.
As UI engineers, we wanted a tool that:
Today, you can use install Mirrorful as a development dependency of your project to run a visual editor of your theme and then directly export your design tokens to.js
, .ts
, .css
, .scss
, .json
. It's lightweight, with no design system lock-in.
Example: using CSS Variables
Example using Javascript Constants
Most importantly, give us feedback: founders@mirrorful.io
Thanks!