• Design a set of re-usable components in Sketch that get turned into JavaScript widgets and used in a product
• The JavaScript widgets are are modified, extended, and changed. Maybe a line here, a color here. Designers now sometimes have component designs don’t quite match what they look like in the wild
• This tool now lets them re-create the Sketch file from the components as the look in the wild. That means when designers work on whole pages, made up of widgets, they’ll look exactly like they would in the wild.
also, from their faq, there is no two-way binding; they do not attempt to extract react code from sketch files. the idea is that the react code is the source of truth.
from a programmer's perspective, sketch is sort of like an exploratory repl where you can play with bits of code (widgets here), composing them into larger functions (sketches), and when you're satisfied with the design you edit your source file and reload the state of the repl so you can continue exploring.
I think this is pretty cool. I might even update my React install and check it out properly
The website doesn't explain it like this.
Super excited to open source this — I'm trying my best to bring design & engineering closer together at Airbnb (and in the world), this has been a super useful project.
I'll be hanging out in this thread all day if you have any questions / want to flame me :)
[tl;dr] - This is the first tool I'm aware of that actually allows you to generate both API docs and design tools from the same source.
Static documentation is a lie waiting to happen. Once docs are even slightly out of date, people lose trust and eventually abandon them.
On the engineering side of the dev/design process, this is easy to work around. We generate documentation from code and structured comments, which allows us to trust our docs as an up-to-date point of truth.
If you're building a design system that both engineers and designers will work with, there's no real solution to keeping sketch symbols and React components in sync. You're essentially stuck maintaining "static documentation" for designers in the form of a sketch file.
More often than not, things get busy, or someone forgets to commit a change to the sketch file, and the sketch symbols fall behind the code used in production.
Developers start to receive mocks that don't match the "standard" components they're using. Designers start to wonder why fidelity is lost by the time features make it to production. The design system falls apart.
`sketch-reactapp` will help us deal with the static documentation problem the same way we deal with it on the engineering side of things: generate from source.
This is the first tool I'm aware of that actually allows you to generate both API docs and design tools from the same source.
Congratulations on the launch!
1.) Design your thing in Sketch
2.) Code your thing in a text editor
3.) Port your code over to this new tool to see it rendered in Sketch?
Like I said. There's some value there (accounting for the changes between 1 & 2), but the workflow feels weird. Maybe someone from AirBnB design can jump in and enlighten me.
Where are your API docs coming from? When you say "the same source", is this because your frontend/backend code is sitting together in a mono-repo?
Not familiar with the AirBnB architecture so I'm interested to know how API docs are adjacent to this topic.
I would think programs like Sketch are useful in general because they give designers a nice way to design things without adding the extra layers of abstraction that code brings (i.e. they can just draw things with a mouse instead of writing instructions that tell the computer how to draw things). But if Sketch is just another rendering layer of react components, then what is the point of having it... why not just look at the rendering in a web browser?
Or am I misunderstanding and there's a way for react code to be generated from Sketch? (Despite this statement in your blog post: "As the industry has coalesced around Sketch, people have sought to generate code from Sketch. This is exciting, but for our challenges we wanted to do the exact opposite — to keep DLS in sync we have to generate Sketch files from code.")
A lot of people when they first learn about this project have a hard time understanding how it would be useful - so you're not alone!
I tweeted ([0]) about this briefly and thought I'd copy here for the benefit of readers in this thread:
> the wild thing about react-sketchapp is that we can now bootstrap designs with the actual code that powers the product we are designing
> it took me a little while to realize the paradigm shift. we normally think of the code / implementation as the end of the process
> this allows us to use production code not only for our production clients, but also for starting the next iteration
> react being decoupled from the underlying UI implementation unlocks a lot of possibilities. this is just one.
> we are starting to view our react components for our design language as not just an implementation, but as the specification itself
[0]: https://twitter.com/intelligibabble/status/856941689029640192It has a Sketch plugin that does a rather competent job of converting Sketch layers/groups into components. (For example, you can prefix a Sketch group with "c:", and React Studio will interpret it as a component.)
Here is a live video demonstrating the Sketch -> React Studio -> React code workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfd7zmlFZw8 (It's in realtime with detailed explanations, so it runs about 40 minutes.)
Disclaimer: I wrote a pile of code for React Studio.
This is a good question — I’m a technical-leaning designer so I’m partial to just using browser-based tools. I think things like Deco and Expo Snack are wonderful.
That said, I’m specifically looking at improving the efficiency of designers’ workflows without changing them. My team is part of DesignOps at Airbnb, maybe useful to consider it analogously to DevOps. ~= “We’re changing the servers that our applications are deployed on without forcing our engineers to learn a new language”.
Anyway, 1) having Sketch templates always-in-sync with real components is huge, 2) we’re building custom UIs on top of Sketch to use those components (which we may open source eventually), 3) this is a baby step to get us to the point where component-centric tools like Deco and Subform are good enough to realistically switch our design team to.
also it opens up things like "using real (suboptimal) data" or cross-project-wide refactoring of design, etc
- René etc is more conceptual - it’s obviously not a practical day-to-day tool
- React Sketch.app solves the problems in our org that I can do something about, but also lets you do combinatorial/permutational exploration (see the GIFs in the intro!) because _it’s just javascript_.
Both embrace the paradigm of UI-as-a-function-of-data, and really are indebted to the mark that Guillermo left on my brain with https://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui
It also led to some exciting new uses:
- component pickers / editors for Sketch that are backed by real components rather than Sketch symbols (build your own UI)
- automatic accessibility checking / internationalization
- using real data in Sketch with real GraphQL queries etc
- as a building block for using Sketch as a canvas for the design tools of your dreams, whilst maintaining compatibility with the tooling your designers use today
AirBnB recently released Lottie that requires After Effects but when compared to Principle, AE feels like Photoshop compared to Sketch. I have a feeling that not many UX designers on Mac want to go back to Adobe tools. Certainly, I don't want to touch Adobe tools again.
But this tool is related to that ui/ux version of Sketch (but with/for React), and not the mis-named Sketch (that was for React)?
Naming is fun.
- react-dom
- react-native
- react-vr
- react-hardware
- react-blessed
- react-three
- react-aframe
etc
it felt like the right thing to do was a descriptive "this is what it is" name rather than a "marketing name" that would be more confusing.
1) Create designs in sketch (mainly core components)
2) Code those designs in React that will generate the React translated version of the sketch
3) Use the react generated sketch to build non-core component designs in sketch . .
4) When the core design changes, update the react component to match the new designs
5) All the other components in the sketch will automatically start using the new updated sketch component
1) Using a text editor like Visual Studio Code, write core components in react-primitives. This code can be largely the same as your real react-native code with all it's handling of layout and internationalization.
https://github.com/lelandrichardson/react-primitives/
2) Create a library of core components. In aggregate, this library is your DLS (Design Language System)
http://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
3) Use react-sketchapp to transform your core components in react-primitives to sketch symbols. If you have a large design system and support multiple languages, then this will save you a lot of time as the number of combinations of layout, language and potential input values are explosive.
http://airbnb.design/painting-with-code/
4) Use sketch to design your new feature. Use sketch symbols to quickly pull in core components. If you need to create a new core component go back to step 1. With all your fancy tooling, it can be as fast as 1 minute to build a new page.
https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/849733176150773761
5) When core components change, go back to the "source of truth", the react-primitives code and modify that. Re-run react-sketchapp. Now all sketch files that depend on that core component will be automatically updated because of updated sketch symbols.
The new format is a ZIP containing a bunch of JSON files per page, so maybe someone will come up with a cross-platform viewer or similar.
Edit: I found this which works with basic Sketch files: https://animaapp.github.io/sketch-web-viewer/
see also https://github.com/xaviervia/sketch2json for some interesting stuff :)
Most of the slickness of Sketch is in its UI though, it'll be tough to replicate. Do you know of any project attempting to do so?
I also hear whisperings of a react-pdf renderer but I haven't seen it
Design Ops (the org that contains my team - Design Tools) - http://airbnb.design/designops-airbnb/
The Way We Build (head of design @alexoid talking about our process) - http://airbnb.design/the-way-we-build/
Building a Visual Language (on our design system) http://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
I think there is definitely a gap in the "literature" for this topic and will be eager to follow any other progress you can share.
Some things I tried: - not autoplaying the videos (but they're super short, so it would be annoying to click play) - playing them when they're in focus & pausing afterwards (would have to mess with our WordPress installation instead of launching this thing) - using GIFs (they were HUGE - I couldn't get them below like 2mb each) - YouTube embeds etc (ugh)
I thought this was the best compromise but yeah. Sorry :(
Design Systems and related tooling makes total sense at certain scale and I can definitely see both designer and developer efficiency gains from consistent building blocks that Design Systems provide. Jon I'm curious if this would still make sense if AirBnB weren't so invested in React and React Native.
You could still use it for styleguides for type & color etc, if you keep those definitions in JSON.
if not, probably not :(
It would be even cooler if it could render React components written for the web without modification, maybe in a transparent webview. I'm guessing Sketch would need to add support for that.
You could write a codemod that turned <div> into <View>, <h1-6> into <Text> etc, but there's complexity in standardizing layout systems & CSS properties too. React Native-style components provide the best chance of us using React as a truly universal platform.
see https://github.com/airbnb/react-sketchapp/issues/37 & https://github.com/airbnb/react-sketchapp/issues/29#issuecom... for some more context
If you have any ideas on solving I'd love to see them in GitHub so I don't lose track of them :)
When solving some problems, it's easier and quicker to use a REPL to get something that more or less works, and then to copy the working bits over to a proper source file to reuse. Before this React Sketch, Sketch.app was just the equivalent of the REPL, where you'd only store the result of your work, and not the process. Now you have a way to, as soon as you're happy with a design you drew by hand, write the code to generate it in order to reuse it in the future.
well, first of all you want to download a page. you haven't done in a while, so you google up the relevant ruby library (open-uri) and install it. then you load it up in a repl, like so
irb> require 'open-uri'
=> true
irb> url = 'http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/'
=> "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/"
irb> page = open(url).read
# lots of html
now that you have confirmed it works, you paste it into your program
require 'open-uri'
def get_movie_html(id)
url = "http://www.imdb.com/title/#{id}"
open(url).read
then just to confirm it, you go back to your repl, load your file and try
irb> page = get_movie_html('tt0093779')
you have now not only written the first part of your program, but it is available for you to use in your repl as you figure out the other bits. as you get each part working properly, extract it into a function and add it to your source code, then reload the source in your repl and continue working.
the main idea is you get very fast feedback about the specific bit of the program you are working on; the repl maintains the state of the data for you, so you can probe at it till you have ironed out the issues, and then once it is in its final form you add it to your concrete code and use it as a building block in the repl.
here's another blog post about it: http://www.davidtanzer.net/rdd_and_tests
the analogy with sketch and react is that similarly, you can design a component (say a top navigation bar) in sketch with a very fast feedback loop, and once you are satisfied with it, you reproduce it in react and then reload your sketch environment from the react file, so that from now on the navigation bar you see in sketch is the exact one you have built in code, and you can use it as a building block for the next part of the site.
[1] https://twitter.com/jina/status/713173129263067136 [2] https://www.clarityconf.com/
As with most misunderstandings/disagreements/arguments in the programming world, this confusion arises from people in different contexts using a tool for one purpose, but not realizing that other people are in different situations trying to achieve different goals with those same tools.
(Specifically, if you are an agency or freelance designer/developer, and you are building a bunch of different sites, then this tool does not serve any useful purpose... but if you have an underlying "design system" and a large company with lots of different products all sharing the same basic design, and a large team to go with it,then this starts to make a lot more sense.)
I do think that design systems can be helpful for smaller, or even 1 person teams as well. It helps you to apply meaningful constrains for your design and reuse common components across the product to shorten development times.
With the library we have both designers and developers can construct completely new views or modifications fairly fast. https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/849733176150773761
Where the React-Sketchapp comes in is help us to keep the system up to date for designers, and in the future build other tools that can help the design workflow.
This is exactly what I'm doing with Semantic UI React. I'm prototyping in React, and building my own visual language on top of the visual language of Semantic UI. I see how I could instead render my components to Sketch instead (if a really great Sketch file with all the Semantic UI components existed).
Thanks!!!
In theory a full design system has most individual pieces defined. You know what your button styles, inputs, headers, etc are and designing new layouts is often a matter of rearranging these various components — you'll occasionally need to design new ones, so that's the outlier here.
This ensures designers are using a single source of truth when it comes to existing components (which is pretty spectacular, because traditionally designers often maintain an overlapping library of static components for design purposes). It also helps hugely that I could pull in real data instead of trying to transpose some real-ish information into a static mock-up.
And of course there's still that design/developer grey area. I'm educated as a designer, but I'm extensively knowledgable about HTML/CSS/SASS — and that still only takes me so far. I know basic JS, but I'm not going to pretend that I can use React. Sometimes I still need to build static mock-ups so I can try out animations or storyboard userflows, do usertesting, etc.
Sketch.app - Description: Most popular native mac app for designing UIs - Built by: Bohemian Coding
react-sketchapp - Description: Convert a UI written in react-primitives to sketch. react-primitives is a subset of react-native. - Built by: Airbnb
I want to say Snack has nothing to do with react-sketchapp, but unfortunately they do share a couple of things. The developer/user of both tools will write code that is largely compatible with each other, basically a shared subset of react-native. Then, there's the whole confusion with the name Sketch. Snack used to be called Sketch. react-sketchapp uses "Sketch.app" as a rendering engine and editing interface. "Sketch.app" is basically the next program in the workflow for the user of react-sketchapp.
Can you elaborate on the automatic accessibility checking? Are you testing the sketch file or the react-primitive code for accessibility tags?
So there would be one sketch file for the basic components that is generated from the React code, but the designers who design specific pages of the site (for example) would still design in sketch, but pull from the components of the one "read-only" (react-generated) sketch files. Very cool!
We have a design systems team that creates & maintains the system (in collaboration with our product designers), resulting in read-only Sketch templates. when _designing with_ canonical components our product designers are using that template, so it's kind of the same workflow - we're just creating the read-only templates from code rather than by hand.
If so, does is not lengthen and complicate a lot your design process?
> the designers who design specific pages of the site (for example) would still design in sketch, but pull from the components of the one "read-only" (react-generated) sketch file
Maybe under a "why use this?" heading?
https://themeforest.net/item/material-design-reactjs-admin-w...
or
I think it would be super cool if React Studio could automatically create a GraphQL api based on the structure of the component data.
We are already doing small experiments in this direction at Graphcool (for example graphql-up https://www.graph.cool/graphql-up/)
Do you think anyone at Reract Studio would be interested in talking more about this? They can ping me at soren@graph.cool :-)