Design handoff
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What is Design handoff?
The process of delivering finalized designs from a designer to a developer, including specs, assets, and context needed to build them accurately.
Design handoff is the critical bridge between design and engineering. A designer marks a design as ready, and a developer needs enough information to build it faithfully: exact dimensions, spacing values, color codes, font specs, exported assets, and interaction notes. Tools like Figma, Zeplin, and Stitch (Google) make handoff easier by letting developers inspect designs and extract specs directly. Poor handoff leads to designs being built incorrectly or requiring constant back-and-forth.
How it relates to Orbit
Sweep, Orbit’s visual reviewer, checks a built screen against its mockup and feeds the Convergence Gate, which keeps the implementation honest to the handoff. See Sweep for details.
When you would use it
When a design is finalized and a developer needs to implement it.
Common operations
- Exporting assets (icons, images) from a design file.
- Inspecting a component's spacing and color values in Figma.
- Writing annotations on a design to explain interactions or edge cases.
Related terms
Where this is taught
No learning path uses this term yet. Browse the Learning Atlas for guided sequences through related ideas.