What Happens When Your Brand Designer and Web Developer Never Talk to Each Other
The designer delivers a Figma file. The developer delivers a site. They're not the same thing.
I've been on both sides. When the designer and developer don't talk, the design drifts. Spacing changes. Type scale gets "adjusted." Interactions get dropped. The client gets a product that works and doesn't quite feel like the brand. Nobody intended it. Nobody owned the gap.
The gap is the handoff. Designers think in pixels and systems. Developers think in components and constraints. Without a shared language—tokens, specs, or one person doing both—something gets lost. I've seen a grid specified in Figma ignored in code because "it was easier this way." The site shipped. The system didn't.
One Friction Moment
On a project I designed, the dev implemented a different spacing scale. I'd used 8pt. He used 4pt. Everything was tighter. I noticed in review. The client hadn't. We fixed it. But the fix was rework. If we'd aligned once at the start—or if I'd built it—there would have been no fix. That's why I design and build myself where I can. No handoff. No drift.
Design tokens for designers help you speak the same language. Vibe coding vs developer is the comparison. Development and UI/UX on this site. Process is how I keep design and build aligned.
