How design works at Supabase

Supabase has recently developed a unique design culture with its team of three designers. The approach emphasizes thinking like an agile developer and making small daily gains while solving large milestones. Design work includes static mockups, interactive prototypes in Figma, code prototypes, wireframe sketches, and sometimes actual building. The focus is on unblocking problems with design work to prevent teams from being paralyzed by how something should work or look. Supabase has also adopted aesthetic and product design principles to maintain a consistent direction across the organization. They use Figma as their primary tool for application UI design and marketing design, maintaining a small design system library. The team includes Design Engineers who can code, allowing rapid shipping of designs. A pipeline exports Figma variables into CSS custom properties, used with TailwindCSS to keep color systems in sync between design files and the development environment.