The design to developer handoff — where screen designs are shared with developers to implement in the product —is a critical point in the product creation process. Any misstep in communication, collaboration, and organization can be costly to companies, and more importantly, their customers.
When critical design work becomes lost in translation to code, the product suffers from a slower time to market and a less than ideal user experience. Developers are bogged down with unfulfilling work, and designers watch in frustration as their designs are compromised. PMs sigh in exasperation.
This generally boils down to two common challenges for designers:
- Keeping files organized and only handing off what’s ready for development
- Clearly communicating design vision and providing the specs your developers need
And similarly, developers often face the challenge of losing time to clarify sizing, placement, colors, or screen flows with their design colleagues.
The process gets more complicated with additional collaborators (we’re looking at you, PMs) and disjointed communication channels over Slack and across various meetings, emails, and project management tools.
Addressing these challenges has been equally fraught with alignment gaps and time lost to inevitable miscommunications. That is, until today. Say hello to the Design Handoff template in Freehand.
Inspect for Freehand makes design handoffs a breeze
We’ve just released Inspect for Freehand to facilitate smoother, team-wide handoffs. Magically turn any Figma or Sketch design file into developer-ready specs with a few clicks of a button.
With Inspect, you can give developers the view they need to make handoffs smooth for you and them — all from a collaborative and infinite canvas.
Try our newest template to jumpstart the process
Inspect for Freehand is just one of the latest additions to the ever-growing Freehand toolkit that makes design handoffs easy. We’ve created a pre-built template that brings it all together for a seamless, team-wide handoff.
With the Design Handoff template, you’ll be able to:
- Clearly articulate big picture context and design vision
- Select and embed design screens ready for development from Figma and Sketch via Craft
- Lay out screens and annotate them using Freehand tools
- Embed live InVision prototypes to show end to end experience
- Link relevant Jira issues for extra context
- Collaborate easily with extended team members through all of Freehand’s existing tools like video walkthroughs with Loom, commenting, and embeds!
Browse our template gallery for more ways to help you and your team collaborate.
