Designing in Figma

The core insight

Claude's HTML/CSS design output is strong because the frontend-design workflow forces a committed aesthetic direction and drives each design dimension as a named decision before generating. Authoring into Figma usually falls off not because Figma is harder, but because that workflow gets skipped — Claude jumps straight to drawing nodes, pixel-pushes instead of thinking in auto-layout, draws primitives instead of composing from a system, and never renders-and-critiques.

The fix: run the same aesthetic engine, anchor it to a DESIGN.md token contract, and execute with figma-use discipline. The aesthetic decisions are medium-independent — this skill is the conductor that lands them as native Figma (auto-layout frames, bound variables, component instances) instead of DOM/CSS.