Designers and developers have been playing a game of telephone for decades. Designers create beautiful mockups, developers interpret them, and somewhere along the way, things get lost in translation. It's like that childhood game where you whisper a message down a line of people, only to find out the last person heard something completely different.
But what if we could skip the telephone game altogether? That's where Builder's Visual Copilot comes in. In this article, we’ll show you how to convert a design file into a working, polished, production-ready UI with just one click.
Visual Copilot is Builder.io’s AI-powered solution for seamlessly converting Figma designs into clean code. We’ve fine-tuned our in-house LLM to transform your designs into responsive code, components, and styling for any major front-end tech stack. It does all this in real-time and often with a single click.
Using Visual Copilot is intuitive and requires very little setup. To begin, make sure you’ve installed the plugin from the Figma community.
Inside Figma, select a frame or layer from a design that you wish to export. Then launch the Visual Copilot plugin and click the Export to Code button. After a few moments, you will see a Success! message and an npx command appear inside the plugin. Copy the command to your clipboard and then open your code editor.
It’s best to run Visual Copilot’s npx command inside your preferred IDE. This way it can automatically respect any AI rules you’ve added to your coding environment. Whether you prefer Cursor, Windsurf, Trae, good old VS Code or something else, Visual Copilot works with all of them.
Open a terminal window and run that npx command. A prompt will appear. Tell it what you want to build using plain English. Say something like "make a graph component. Use the echarts library". And that’s it! Visual Copilot will check your project setup, create clean code from your exported Figma design, and drop it right into your files.
Visual Copilot will also handle many core design requirements. For example, automatic responsiveness is included out of the box. This one feature can save your team many hours. No more fiddling with CSS to get that component working on all screen sizes.
Visual Copilot is also framework and library agnostic. The plugin exports generated code for any major frontend framework. These include React, Angular, Svelte, Vue, Qwik, pure HTML (that’s right, Astro fans 🚀), and more.
The same goes for common styling libraries and design patterns. Using Tailwind CSS? Or maybe you’re a Styled Components type of dev? All in on Emotion? No worries—Visual Copilot will adapt to them all.
A true Figma-to-code solution is about more than turning designs into generated code - it’s about turning designs into your code. Visual Copilot can interface with your existing component libraries and in-house design systems using its powerful component mapping feature.
A clever CLI command helps you map your components to a design file’s “Figma components” before you start your export. This way you avoid generating random components with every Figma export. Instead, you get accurate, on-brand translations that reuse your existing code and design systems.
Sometimes you don't need to fit a design into an existing app. Sometimes you want to build something new, fast. That's where Visual Copilot's Lovable integration shines. It turns your Figma designs into deployed and working code in minutes, not hours.
You get React, Tailwind, and Vite for the frontend, plus Supabase for your database needs. Want to add features? Just tell Lovable's AI what you need in plain English. Everything syncs to GitHub, and soon you'll be able to pull in new Figma design changes automatically - perfect for those early days when your layout keeps changing.
When using the Visual Copilot Figma plugin, following these best practices can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the conversion process:
- Use auto layout: Implement Figma's auto layout feature to organize elements into responsive hierarchies. This is the single most impactful action for ensuring a smooth import.
- Define images explicitly: For complex designs, use Figma's export feature to help the AI model recognize elements as images or icons.
- Group background layers: Combine layers that form background elements to simplify the structure and enhance export quality.
- Minimize overlaps and intersections: Align boxes only with related components and avoid unnecessary overlapping to prevent undesired results.
- Avoid translucent effects: Stick to fully opaque colors, as transparency can be challenging for AI to interpret accurately.
- Size text boxes correctly: Keep text bounding boxes snug to their content to avoid issues with extra whitespace or unexpected line breaks.
- Consider design sizes: Create designs that closely match real-world dimensions for practical and accurate results. Address any large-scale designs within the plugin or communicate with developers for optimal outcomes.
The old "telephone game" between designers and developers is finally over. Visual Copilot ends pixel-pushing, debugging CSS, and wasting time on basic DOM work. You get clean code that matches your design, works with your stack, and uses your components.
Need a quick prototype? Use the Lovable integration. Working on a big app? Visual Copilot plus Component Mapping fits right in. It handles the boring stuff so you can build things that users love.
The future of Figma-to-code is here, and it's simple. Try Visual Copilot - you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.
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