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 seamless and efficient collaboration on 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 details required for implementation. This tool streamlines the design-to-development process, reducing the need for constant communication and minimizing implementation errors. It helps teams deliver products faster and with greater consistency by organizing designs, specifications, and assets in a single, accessible location.
Key Features and Functionality
Automatic Specification Generation
Zeplin automates the creation of specification documents, eliminating the need for manual documentation. It extracts measurements, colors, fonts, and other design elements, generating CSS code, Android Studio code, Sass, Less, and more, directly from the shared designs.
Design Variant Management
Zeplin allows designers to organize screen variants (such as desktop and mobile breakpoints, light and dark mode, error and loading states) into a single screen. This feature helps in reducing clutter and makes it easier for developers to toggle through different states of a component or screen, ensuring clarity and efficiency.
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 view and compare different versions of designs, ensuring traceability and auditability.
Collaborative Workspace
Zeplin offers a collaborative workspace where teams can communicate intent, assign tasks, and capture feedback in a central, shared space. Features like Tag Groups, Comments, and Annotations facilitate asynchronous collaboration across different functions, lifecycles, and geographies.
Design System and Component Management
Zeplin helps in managing design systems by surfacing design system information on every screen. It connects design components with their codebase counterparts, allowing developers to access components in their codebase directly from the designs. Integrations with tools like Storybook, GitHub, and other developer-first workflow tools further enhance this functionality.
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.
Workflow Management
Zeplin enables teams to manage workflows efficiently by separating ready-to-build designs from those in progress. It allows for the assignment of tasks, review of designs, and approval processes, all within a centralized and collaborative environment.
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 features and functionality make it an essential platform for design-first organizations aiming to accelerate product delivery at scale.