Turn your Designs into Code

Ideas into reality

There is not yet a right formula or app that can translate a design into code flawlessly. The industry has been working on perfecting this feature for a while now. Even though there is good progress on the matter, there is still no perfect tool that can create an App from Design. We will show you some cool examples of companies doing their best to make this come true.

Bravo

Bravo Studio is a new app that does an outstanding job turning Figma files to iOS and Android apps. One of the things you need to consider is to name your layers in a specific way so Bravo studio can translate your designs to code.

Draftbit

Drafbit is an exciting tool, it is like Webflow but for React Native apps. You can visually create UI components and different assets. These can then be exported into native apps for Android or iOS.

Anima App

Anima app lets you turn your designs from Sketch, Figma or Xd to HTML, CSS and JS with no dependencies.

Sketch2React

Sketch2React is a framework for Sketch that helps you convert your Sketch designs into HTML and React sites. You need to organize your layers by specific names and Sketch2React will make sure to transform those layers to HTML or React assets.

Glide

With glide you can create basic iOS and Android apps very easily. You can use spreadsheets to take data from it. Its UI is very intuitive and for someone who just started designing or developing apps, it can be a really good option.

Convert your design to HTML with Anima

For this exercise, we will work with Figma and Anima. Anima will help us transform our design to HTML. This is a paid feature, but we will show you the process just before the step you need to pay for the feature. The first thing we will do is download the Anima plugin, so in Figma, let's go to Community > Plugins, and let's look for Anima.

Now let's select the design where we will apply the plugin. Let's go to the tab bar, click on Plugins > Anima. A new window will open. Here, click on Create New to generate a new archive in Anima.

Add a name to the project, and select the folder where you'd like to save the file.

Our next step is to build the prototype of our design. So let's create all the different connections between the frames. This is an essential step because Anima will take this as a reference to generate the HTML.

Next, let's press the button Preview in Browser from the Anima window. Wait for a moment for Anima to generate the prototype inside Anima's platform. Once it's done, you can click Open.

When you click on the Open button, it will take you to the live prototype in Anima's platform. Make sure that all the connections are working and are in the right place.

Finally, you will notice that in the top right corner of the screen, there is a gray button with the name Export Code. You can click on the button, and this will export your prototype into code. Remember that for this to work; you need to pay for Anima's pro version.

Conclusion

To build an app without coding is still a field that needs more exploration. Different tools are trying to do the job but there is not yet a tool that can create an app directly from the design tool seamlessly.