Richard Rembert

Posted on Jul 15, 2022 • Edited on Sep 15, 2022

20+ Best Figma Plugins to Create & Manage Design Systems for Web Designers in 2022

#design #webdev #beginners #tutorial

Design systems allow web designers to create a cohesive and consistent design across all of a brand’s digital properties. Figma is a great tool for creating design systems, but it can be difficult to manage them without the right plugins.

In this article, we will look at the best Figma plugins for creating and managing design systems!

1. Design System Organizer

Design System Organizer is a Figma design system plugin that helps you manage and organize your components and styles. It allows you to quickly reorganize and clean up a huge library with multiple names, copy styles between files, and bulk relink instances and styles between libraries. You can also clone styles and components in one click when only a few parameters need to be changed.

Design System Organizer supports all types of styles, variants for components, and local and external libraries. It also has a context menu and shortcuts for quickly selecting, deleting, renaming, and grouping items. You can even apply a relink to a selection, page, or entire document.

Pricing starts at $24 for a single-user lifetime license. A free trial is available.

2. Figmaster

Figmaster is a well-regarded way to learn how to create a design system from scratch in Figma. Figmaster is a workbook plugin for Figma that contains a large set of exercises on how to build your modern design system from scratch. By doing exercises in Figma, you learn and create your guide style and component library simultaneously.

Figmaster is all about practice, so you can start using acquired knowledge right away. You’ll start by creating design tokens and converting them into Figma styles. You’ll also prepare the icon library for your system. You’ll use those styles, icons, and rules to create components, and learn how auto-layout and variants can help you build pixel-perfect components.

After that, you’ll create documentation components and frames, document your components and styles, and build a documentation page in Figma. Finally, you’ll build a simple UI with your design system and customize the colors, typography, or component properties to match your product or brand requirements.

Figmaster is a paid plugin, starting at US$99.99 for a single-user license. A free trial is available.

3. Sprint UI

Sprint UI is a design system generator that allows you to rapidly modify a pre-designed style system. It claims to be the first of its kind. Every modification you make with the plugin will automatically be reflected in all aspects of your design.

Sprint UI allows you to set up your palette, fonts, and other settings quickly and easily. You can generate a complete design system that’s ready to customize and use in your next project in a few minutes.

The plugin also includes a range of custom icons that can be used in your projects.

The Sprint UI plugin works with Figma’s new Variants feature, so you can use it to create different versions of your designs (e.g., light or dark mode).

Sprint UI comes with all sorts of batteries included, such as a collection of over 700 resizable components.

Sprint UI is a subscription service that starts at US$8/month. It offers a free trial.

4. Toolabs Design System Manager

Toolabs Design System Manager allows you to define or update design tokens in one panel and immediately see the changes reflected through your Figma design. Toolabs DSM lets you manage your theme through Figma styles. You can create and attach styles to tokens, tokenize styles, and more. This makes it easy to manage your design system and keep it up-to-date with the latest changes.

It offers features for populating designs with real content from external sources, as well as building design system documentation with an intuitive editor. You can also programmatically access design tokens via GraphQL API, or export design tokens in a range of formats, including CSS, Less, Sass, JSON, YAML, JavaScript, Swift or Android.

Toolabs Design System Manager is a free plugin.

5. Figma Tokens

Design tokens are an essential element of a design system. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your design process, then check out Figma Tokens. This plugin gives you the ability to generate, change, and use design tokens for a whole range of design options, like border radii, spacer units, and semantic colors.

You can also reference tokens in each other to create type scales, container padding great, or semantic colors.

Figma Tokens is a free plugin.

6. Super Tidy

Super Tidy is one of the best plugins for keeping your design files and canvas tidy. It can align your frames to a customizable spacing grid, rename them, and reorder them in the layers list based on canvas position.

Keep your design system files looking like the source of truth that they are.

7. Design Lint

Design Lint is a Figma plugin that helps you find errors in your designs. It’s an incredibly helpful tool for keeping a design consistent.

Design Lint is designed to help you crunch through issues fast. Anything that the plugin can fix automatically can be taken care of with one click. For the remainder, there are a number of nice workflow touches that make tidying up a breeze.

The error list updates as you work, and the plugin scans each layer individually. Even if there are multiple pages or screens affected by one problem (like missing styles) you can be sure they’ll be found. Clicking on an issue will select that layer in the design so you can apply a fix right away, and with certainty.

Design Lint is a free and open-source plugin.

8. Style Organizer

The Style Organizer plugin is designed to help with managing color and text styles in your designs.

Style Organizer also has a number of great features, including the ability to group elements with the same appearance together and merge and link selected styles. It also has an auto-fix function that will automatically link all elements with the same appearance to the most used style on the page.

It can help you keep your color and text styles organized, making it easy to find and use the right style for your designs.

Style Organizer is a free plugin.

9. Typography Styleguide

Typography Styleguide generates a clean, attractive typography style guide page from your design. It uses your file’s local text styles to achieve this in one click.

Typography Styleguide is a free plugin.

10. Color Styleguide

Color Styleguide generates a color style guide using local color styles. These plugins produce output with a consistent style, so they pair well together when working on design system documentation and design files.

Color Styleguide is a free plugin.

11. Content Buddy

Content Buddy allows you to edit text content in multiple layers, instances, and components in Figma. With Content Buddy, you can search for text content in your selection and replace it with new text. This plugin is extremely helpful when you need to make changes to a design system.

Content Buddy is a free plugin.

12. Content Reel

Content Reel helps designers quickly fill their frames with realistic content. Simply drag and drop to add placeholder content to your design.

Pulling text strings, images, and icons from one palette will help you design more efficiently without stopping to find or generate dummy content. Content Reel also allows you to create and save custom content of your own, which you’re able to share with other Figma users.

Content Reel is a free plugin.

13. Component Master Manager

Component Master Manager moves master and variant components from various pages in your design to their own page. You can delete unused components, and restore any that you did need.

Component Master Manager is a free plugin.

14. Master for Figma

Master is a plugin for managing Figma components. With it, you can create new components from anything in your design and attach existing ones. Create new components only once you know you need one for the job and preserve overrides in the process.

Like the previous plugin, Master will also move main components to their own location. However, Master’s additional features come at a price, costing US$37.5 for a single-user lifetime license.

15. Ready Components

Ready Components is a great plugin for creating reusable components from boilerplate. It provides ready-made components which are generalized and can be used in any UI design. Component colors and various properties can be customized easily.

Ready Components is a free plugin.

16. Colors to Code

Colors to Code converts color tokens to code, making it much easier to convert your design system’s color palette into useful formats. It currently supports JSON, CSS, SCSS, and Android formats.

Colors to Code is a free plugin.

17. ZeroHeight for Figma

ZeroHeight is a collaboration tool that lets you easily create living style guides and keep all your design system documentation in one place.

It’s quick to set up, can be edited by non-technical team members, and syncs across multiple platforms including Figma to ensure your design system stays up-to-date across all work surfaces.

ZeroHeight has paid plans for teams starting at US$49/month, but has a free tier for one editor and one style guide.

18. Contrast

If you’re a designer, you know accessibility is important. Making sure your site meets the WCAG guidelines is crucial to making sure everyone can use your site. And one of the most important aspects of accessibility is contrast.

Contrast is a Figma plugin that makes it easy to check the contrast ratios of colors as you work, so you can be sure your design is accessible.

When you run Contrast on a layer, it will check the color behind your selection and provide the contrast ratio as well as the WCAG reference pass and fail levels.

You can also scan an entire Figma page to generate a report on all text-based contrast problems.

Contrast is a free plugin.

19. Figma to HTML

Figma to HTML converts Figma layers to HTML, CSS, React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, and more. The output is quality, responsive front-end code.

If you need to convert Figma layers into front-end code, Figma to HTML is the plugin for you. Quickly and easily export your Figma designs as clean, responsive front-end code.

You can also use the plugin to import HTML from any web page into Figma – perfect for quickly creating design components based on live sites. With Figma to HTML, it’s easy to turn real site components into design components. Just enter the URL you want to import from after running the plugin instead of selecting a layer.

Figma to HTML is a free plugin.

20. Color Search

If you’re a designer, chances are you’ve had to search for colors before. Maybe you’re looking for that perfect green to match your client’s logo, or you’re trying to find a color scheme for your latest project.

Either way, Color Search is a great plugin for Figma that can help you out. Enter any term and it will return up to five color options. Pick your favorites and add them to your local styles right from the plugin. Color Search is a handy tool that can save you time and hassle.

Color Search is a free plugin.

Honorable Mentions

Summary

There are a ton of great Figma plugins out there that can help you streamline your design system workflow. These are just a few of our favorites! What plugins do you use to make your design system development process easier?

Conclusion

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