Helping designers be more productive with a custom Figma plugin

We developed a Figma plugin to transform screenshots to editable layouts in Figma. This plugin was awarded a creator grant by Figma.

As a designer, I am always looking for ways to be more productive. Working for a product company, I kept having to update copy in my designs, because it was changed externally. Often times I was starting a design building on someone else’s work.

I was bothered with the time it took to have to recreate a clean starting point to then be able to recreate a design.

To solve this annoyance, I designed and developed a Figma plugin called Screenshot to Layout that, given a screenshot, outputs editable text. This then gives you a starting point to work from.

While I am primarily a designer with front-end skills, in this project, I challenged myself on the development side. I jumped through several hoops, including figuring out how to run a proxy server, how to work with the output of an external machine learning model, how to create a usage-based billing system and in general how to create advanced Figma plugins.

Screenshot to Layout was awarded a creator grant by Figma. We'd like to thank the folks at Figma for supporting our work.