Year in review 2023

Talking with our customers these busy days before Christmas feels like a sneak peek into 2024 – the excitement, the plans, but yes, also the shared challenge we noticed related to reaching top notch quality of their digital platforms.

Can you relate to this challenge?

This year, Specify has launched multiple features, the biggest being a new repository in beta (hint hint, it’s not in beta anymore) and it's great to see how Designers & Developers all over the world are embracing this new functionality. As the end of year is approaching we would love to guide you through our biggest highlights of the year, all of them are launched with that same challenge in mind: how to improve the quality of your online platforms?

Destinations

Let’s start off with a huge highlight, related to Destinations. Our team has worked insanely hard on delivering top notch features, all related to design tokens. And 2023 has been a great year for design tokens as we all know! We published our Notion integration allowing to document tokens in a Notion database. Then, we gave developers more power to version their tokens via npm. Finally, we expanded our Raycast extension to leverage token documentation.

New Specify Design Token Format

After at least 6 months of intense work, it was time to show a first glimpse of our new token format. Based on the Design Token Community Group standard it provides a wide range of new options like modes, collections, groups & aliases. With this format you are ready for the future.

Figma Variables and Specify's response

In June, Figma announced their long awaited Variables. Our team crushed it and published a first compatibility in no time. One month later, we released code as a source allowing to be compatible with Tokens Studio. Everything thanks to our new format.

Our Advanced Repository

To close the year and after 5 months of beta testing, we released our new Advanced repository. Alongside all the new integrations quoted above, this new repository provides a deeper view of your design token system nurtured by several types of advanced sources.

The Advanced repository makes it possible for you to sync design tokens coming from Figma Variables, Styles, Tokens Studio or a JSON file. And it provides possibilities to customize your output - not only in format but also in organizational structure.

Anything else?

Next to this, we like to have hackathons. It’s a great way to let our team think out of the box. A couple of projects emerged like the Figma Variable Translator plugin that allows you to automatically translate your string variables in Figma in any language!

A big thank you to our customers

Let’s not forget about our customers, we’ve had great customer cases released this year. Ranging from Dashlane, using Specify for smoothening their handover process, to Carrefour leveraging the platform for versioning.

At Specify we are lucky to serve customers of all sizes and quite recently in 2023 we’ve released a customer case sharing insights on how their S&P 500 company has built their design to code workflow, making use of Specify as their Design Token Engine.

Yes, 2023 has been the year of design tokens and we are so proud of what our team accomplished. New integrations, features, workflows and our new format have been on the menu for the past few months and we want to thank everyone for their confidence in Specify! In 2024 we will focus even more on Design Tokens, their relevance and their power in your design system. Get ready for some insane flexibility, customizability and control. Get ready for the Design Token Engine of the century!