When Off-the-Shelf Plugins Aren’t Enough

Plugins can automate repetitive design work, but the public library won’t always cover your team’s specific needs. Your components, design system, or product constraints may be too idiosyncratic for a generic solution. When that happens, the answer is to build your own bespoke tools. Teams at Uber, GitHub, and Atlassian did exactly that, and shared their approaches and lessons at Figma’s Config conference.

A Mono Plugin for GitHub’s Workflows

Brian Lovin, Staff Product Designer at GitHub, began building plugins out of frustration with repetitive tasks. Each utility he wrote solved a specific pain point, and he eventually consolidated them into a single interface for the broader team.

Borders and Color Theming

One early plugin targeted GitHub’s list item components. Instead of maintaining several divider components, the team could now define all divider sizes and placements in a single group and toggle the correct one via plugin. For GitHub’s upcoming mobile app, which needed light and dark themes plus a high-contrast mode for each, Lovin built a plugin to search and manage the growing list of functionally named color styles. The same tool allows designers to switch an entire design from one theme to another in a couple of clicks—a significant time save when colors are visually similar across themes.

Real Data and a Shared Tool

The team also needed realistic mockups to stress-test designs. A data population plugin pulls live samples from GitHub’s API and maps content—avatars, usernames, full names—to component layers by name. After building these separate utilities, Lovin bundled them into one “mono plugin,” providing a seamless way for other designers to install and access the entire set of enhancements from a single UI.

Generator Plugins at Atlassian

Atlassian’s Design Systems Lead Jake Miller was concerned about filler content or stock imagery accidentally slipping into production. Existing content generator plugins were too generic for their needs. The team’s ADG Data Generator plugin lets designers pull content from the specific product they are working on—project names and ticket numbers for Jira, branches and commit messages for BitBucket—with fields that are correspondingly linked, like a project description that matches its name.

The plugin also generates user data with a notable twist: avatars and profile photos are AI-generated images of realistic people who don’t actually exist. This avoids accidentally shipping a real person’s photograph. Atlassian has shared the source code for this generator with the wider community.

Vehicle Mockups, Crits, and Linting at Uber

Uber’s Lily Nguyen and Vietanh Nguyen created over four plugins to improve collaboration, reduce inconsistencies, and speed up workflows.

Crits on Your Own Device

Evaluating a mobile design usually means holding it in your hand. Uber’s crit process was open and collaborative, but presenting on a large screen lost that context. Their plugin generates a QR code that mirrors the selected Figma frame to each participant’s device, letting everyone experience the design closely enough to give more thoughtful feedback.

A Linter for Designers

Developers have long used linting to automate checks for errors and stylistic inconsistencies. The team brought this to design with a plugin that finds incorrectly applied color styles and objects missing them entirely. It flags problems and guides users toward the correct semantically named colors from the palette. This reduces errors during developer handoff and supports their light/dark mode plugin for instant cross-theme previews.

Uber Garage

Given the range of vehicles—cars, scooters, helicopters—designing accurate map mockups was painstaking. The Uber Garage plugin lets a designer pick a vehicle, rotate a 3D model to the desired perspective, and drop it into the design in place.

Getting Started Building Your Own

If any of these tools feel like something you need, consider these starting points from Figma’s plugin ecosystem:

  • Plugin API docs: The Figma Plugin API documentation includes a getting-started guide, an API reference, and notes on plugin UI and network requests.
  • Community support: The Figma Plugins Slack workspace puts you in touch with other developers and Figma team members who field questions and feedback on the API roadmap.
  • Open-source plugins: The plugins-on-GitHub repository collects plugin source code and resources, including React, Vue, and Svelte boilerplates.
  • Tutorial: Dan Hollick’s six-part tutorial walks you through building a color-contrast checker from scratch.