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What is Zeplin?

Learn more about Zeplin

Bedriye avatar
Written by Bedriye
Updated over a week ago

Zeplin is the trusted platform for accelerating product delivery at scale, helping teams deliver on the promise of design. It serves for documenting designs, managing workflows, and streamlining the design-to-development workflow while providing a structured and organized workspace to publish finalized designs so the team has clarity on exactly what to build.

Zeplin helps bridge the gap between design and code, making it easier for design teams to accurately translate the designs to code while ensuring that the final product remains consistent with the original design.

πŸ’β€β™€οΈ Watch the demo video for more details, and keep scrolling to read more.

Communicate intent

With Zeplin, you can document what to build and how designs should behave in a central, searchable, and collaborative place for the entire product team. In Zeplin, you have separate ready-to-build designs so developers and the rest of the team know which designs are in development.

You can track changes for each screen and component automatically. Zeplin creates versions of each screen and component, capturing changes over time in a version history, while design tools save versions of the entire file. This version history creates a complete record and audit trail for traceability. You can toggle through individual screen versions or view the full version list with commit messages and compare the changes between different versions with Version Diff.

With Zeplin, you can organize designs in a standard way, making designs easy to find and understand for your entire product development team. Zeplin uses a structured grid to present designs in a purposeful order that can be filtered and searched versus an open canvas where the order is subjective. Using Sections will help visually arrange your screens, Tags will help categorize screens based on properties that matter to your workflow, and Global search will allow you to easily find what you want across all your projects and screens. Zeplin also conveniently groups all the different screen variants and component variants into one, whereas design tools show these as multiple separate frames/components.

Zeplin helps you communicate the complete user journey by displaying product requirements, user flows, and design behaviors on each screen so developers don't overlook conditional paths or uncommon use cases. Flows provide an open canvas with dynamic connectors, labels, and shapes for visualizing complete user journeys. You can put them into Groups with quick sharing links that are easy for the team to digest and reference or create flows with or without finished mockups with placeholder screens.

Collaborate asynchronously

With Zeplin, you can unit workflows across functions, lifecycles, and geographies.

You can use Tag Groups to communicate better about the latest updates on your screens, track development progress, and assign screens to project members; capture feedback in a central, shared space where everyone can contribute from anywhere, anytime.

Your team can asynchronously exchange feedback and resolve issues in Comments to jot down some inspiration, provide feedback, or pass on notes to a product manager.

To document requirements and design intent, you can benefit from the one-way, always-visible instructions that will remain pinned to a screen. With Annotations, you can document how your design should behave with descriptive GIFs/videos, reference product requirements, and even share API endpoints.

With remote work still going strong, staying on top of relevant notifications is key. For every version published, Zeplin keeps your team updated with automatic notifications in-app, emails, and messages in Slack or Teams. You can check all your in-app notifications and manage them in a streamlined way and stay up to date with desktop and email notifications.

With Approvals, you can get the green light from stakeholders and move projects forward on time. Approvals in Zeplin help teams avoid many issues, such as inconsistent decisions, complex signoff processes, and losing precious time, by offering a structured and systematic method for managing stakeholder approval.

Build efficiently

You can accurately translate design to code with Zeplin, where developers can access a centrally documented design system during the build with clearly labeled elements β€” including components, color, text, and spacing tokens.

Zeplin highlights each component on the screen; with one click, you can see all components on a screen β€” even if they haven't been added to Styleguides, so it's easy to understand how they apply to the overall design. The developers can also see a list of other screens the selected component is used inβ€” within a project and across projects.

Connected Components allows developers to access components in their codebase right on the designs – with links to Storybook, GitHub, and any other valuable documentation for their workflow, helping them save time, reuse as much code as possible, and better estimate the workload.

With the Storybook Integration, Zeplin lets you link Zeplin components to stories in Storybook easily. Once it's set up, you can access Storybook code snippets and documentation across screens and components within Zeplin.

With Styleguides, Zeplin automatically generates design tokens for colors, text styles, and spacing and keeps values centrally documented and up-to-date. It also keeps style elements like colors and text styles organized, appropriately named, and easy to access right on designs.

You can connect your everyday tools like Jira, Trello, Slack, and VS Code through official integrations with Zeplin: Workflow integrations with Zeplin. With Zeplin's API and Webhooks, you can also create custom workflows to support your specific needs.

To learn more about Zeplin, reach out to our Customer Success crew at success@zeplin.io to schedule a 30-minute call.


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