Product Overview of Zeplin
Zeplin is a comprehensive design delivery and collaboration platform designed to bridge the gap between design, analysis, and development teams, ensuring a seamless and efficient workflow in digital product design projects.
What Zeplin Does
Zeplin serves as a centralized platform where designers can share high-quality designs with developers, providing all the necessary specifications and assets for implementation. It streamlines the design-to-development process, reducing the need for constant communication and minimizing implementation errors. This platform is tailored to help teams deliver products faster and with greater consistency, making it an essential tool for design-first organizations.
Key Features and Functionality
Automated Design Specifications
Zeplin automatically generates specification documents, eliminating the need for manual documentation. It provides developers with detailed information such as measurements, colors, fonts, and other design elements, along with automatically generated CSS code, Android Studio code, Sass, Less, and more.
Design Variant Management
Zeplin allows designers to organize screen variants into a single screen, making it easy for developers to toggle through different states, such as desktop and mobile breakpoints, light and dark mode, error and loading states. This feature helps in maintaining a tidy workspace and reduces the complexity associated with managing multiple design variants.
Integration with Design Tools
Zeplin integrates seamlessly with popular design tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and Photoshop. This integration enables designers to publish their designs directly into Zeplin, where they are automatically organized and made accessible to the development team.
Versioning and Change Tracking
Zeplin provides a robust versioning system that tracks changes for each screen and component automatically. This feature creates a version history, allowing teams to toggle through individual screen versions, view the full version list, and compare changes between different versions using the Version Diff tool.
Collaborative Workflow
Zeplin facilitates asynchronous collaboration by allowing teams to assign tasks, capture feedback, and approve designs in a central, shared space. Features like Tag Groups, Comments, and Annotations help in communicating design intent and tracking development progress effectively.
Design System and Codebase Integration
Zeplin connects design components with their codebase counterparts, supporting frameworks like React, Vue.js, Angular, and Swift. It integrates with tools such as Storybook, GitHub, and other developer-first workflow tools, enabling developers to access components and their documentation directly from the designs.
Styleguides and Design Tokens
Zeplin automatically generates and maintains design tokens for colors, text styles, and spacing, keeping these elements organized, named, and easily accessible. This ensures consistency across the design and development process.
Centralized Documentation
Zeplin allows teams to document designs, product requirements, and user flows in a central, searchable, and collaborative space. This ensures that all team members have clear visibility into what needs to be built and how designs should behave.
In summary, Zeplin is a powerful tool that enhances team collaboration, streamlines the design-to-development process, and ensures that digital products are delivered efficiently and with high quality. Its robust features and integrations make it an indispensable asset for any team involved in product design and development.