Have you ever spent hours perfecting a design in Figma, only to hand it over to an AI tool and watch it completely fall apart? It’s a common frustration. You’re looking for a clean, functional prototype, but you end up with a jumbled mess of poorly rendered SVGs and broken layouts.
In my latest deep dive, I walk through a “messy” real-world experiment: turning a custom designed page into a working prototype using Figma Make.
Here’s the breakdown of how to bridge that gap between “pretty picture” and “interactive prototype.”
The Problem: Messy Files Files Don’t Play Nice
The experiment started with a high-fidelity design imported from Figma with some design elements created in Affinity Designer. On the surface, it looked great. But under the hood? It was a nightmare of raw SVGs, loose layers, and zero structure. When the AI tried to turn that into code, it didn’t know what was a graphic, what was a layout, or what was just a decorative line.
Figma Grid Might Be Hurting You
One of the most interesting takeaways was the “Grid Trap.” You’d think that setting up a strict grid inside Figma would help the AI, right? Surprisingly, it did the opposite. It created unnecessary complexity that confused the code generation. The lesson? Keep your Figma structure simple and rely on the AI to interpret the relationship between elements rather than forcing a rigid grid too early.
The Fix: Auto-Layout and File Structure
If you want the AI to succeed, you have to do a bit of “pre-flight” cleaning:
- Clean up your SVGs: Don’t let messy vector groups clutter the file and keep imported vector art in one group, no sub-groups.
- Use Auto-Layout: If it’s in Auto-Layout, Figma Make does a better job positioning those elements on screen.
- Componentize: Grouping related items into components tells the AI, “This is one piece of logic.”
Getting to the Finish Line with Code Updates
Even with a clean Figma file, the first pass of code might be 80-90% there. The secret sauce is in the small adjustments you can make with Tailwind classes and markup updates.
Check out the full process below: