Designer - Developer Spec hand-off?

Question

What is the easiest way to share specs with the developer? Instead of mentioning the specs in the design.

I did have a look at Zeplin, Avocode, Marvelapp etc. for handoff since we have our own library for components. Every time we need to mention the padding, text specs (font-size, color etc). In case of components, we do mention the variant size (for ex: button-xs (extra small), button-sm (small ) & so on).

But we do face problem while mentioning the padding and text specs etc. How can we save this time & effort?

Answer 1

I know you've mentioned this above but Zeplin is a great tool to allow developers to see html & css in the designs so, our developers love it. I would consider this.

Another thing I would consider is a pattern library. A pattern library (if youre not familiar with it, forgive me if you are) is a stylistic set of guidelines for a design system. This allows you to document everything from, components, buttons, grids, typography, measurements etc. It takes alot of effort to maintain it but designing pages and layouts can save alot of time in the long run, especially in handoffs as things like measurements etc are set out in them.

Developers can also contribute to this with their code and show how that side of things work too.

Here are some great examples from companies: http://styleguides.io/examples.html