Hey HN! Mirrorful (
https://www.mirrorful.com/) is an open-source developer framework that helps front-end engineers manage their design systems. We’ve been building Mirrorful with the open-source community (
https://github.com/Mirrorful/mirrorful) and wanted to share our beta with you. Check out our online demo to get the idea:
https://app.mirrorful.com/.
Design systems can be thought of as the “building blocks of your app” which makes me think of Lego bricks. Mirrorful helps you manage your codebase’s Lego bricks and ensure that they are consistent across all of your apps and platforms.
We saw as product engineers how hard it is to get code to match Figma mock ups. High-quality design is a competitive advantage, so getting your UI pixel perfect can matter a lot, but is time-consuming and tedious.
When we worked for large public companies, we saw that good component libraries help, but engineers are often still dealing with tweaking small design decisions. There are a lot of inefficiencies. We also worked at a small startup and saw what it was like to not have a design system. No design system led to copy pasta code, and days of back-and-forth on simple things like “what hex should i be using for the hover state?”
Design systems are tricky to get right. Picking an out-of-the-box solution is easy to begin with, but one day you’ll be cursing yourself due to lack of flexibility (we did!). On the other hand, creating a design system from scratch is super time-consuming even for the best frontend engineers. Mirrorful is our way out of this dilemma.
Mirrorful is completely open-source and written in Typescript. We’re starting with basic design elements—commonly called “design tokens” — such as colors, typography, and shadows, but have plans to expand our scope into more complex components.
As frontend engineers ourselves, we wanted a tool that lives in code but is visual. It had to be super easy to set up, but also prepare you for scale so you and/or your team don’t end up copy-pasting everywhere. We decided to make it an NPM package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/mirrorful) that runs a localhost editor and exports out your design tokens into any configuration you want: .js, .ts, .css, .scss, .json. It’s lightweight with no design system lock-in.
Our product is completely self-serve: just install our NPM package. If you run Mirrorful locally, a visual dashboard will pop up at localhost:5050 that lets you manage your theme and export various configuration files directly into code.
Pricing is similar to other open-source companies—we charge for cloud-hosted features and for premium components.
We’ve built open-source/open-core projects before and love interacting with contributors from all over the world. If anyone has any opinions on what we’re building, we’re all ears. Check us out at mirrorful.com and at github.com/Mirrorful/mirrorful and give it a shot!
1. How does this compare/relate to https://backlight.dev/?
2. How does a designer work with this? Is it meant to be used by developers only? Where does this fit in the Figma --> Code workflow?