Digital production is a mission-critical capability for modern businesses—but for most organizations, it's inefficient. We’ll even go so far as to say it’s backwards. Inefficient because most teams’ workflows involve too much rework and unnecessary customization. Backwards because they often start in the wrong place.
For most teams, once requirements are gathered, research is conducted, and user journeys are planned, design begins in earnest in an infinite canvas tool, like Figma.
Creativity is unbound!
If you’re reading this, we’d guess your team is probably using (or working towards using) libraries of vector components and styles. These libraries represent UX, brand, and style decisions that can be easily reused to more efficiently build feature, page, and experience designs. These building blocks and palettes represent parameters, set with intention, and aligned (hopefully!) to code implementations. When adhered to, these parameters allow your entire organization to ship better products faster.
But here’s the problem, when you start with tools like Figma – even if you’re using a library as a starting point – creativity is unbound.
If we want to embrace and work within intentionally-defined parameters – systems that allow us to go faster – we need to flip the script and begin interface design within tools that respect the parameters and the constraints of the end user environment: a coded interface, not the unbound canvas of a vector design tool.
Modern platforms like Knapsack are finally making this possible by providing new tools for prototyping and composition rooted in code but approachable by anyone, including non-technical users.
These constrained environments – based on the parameters your team has already implemented and the realities of a coded environment – allow teams to compose and prototype interfaces with reusable, production-ready components first, making it easy to scope the high-effort, bespoke work the infinite canvas is needed for.
Starting from a constrained environment makes digital production faster, more efficient, and more reliable, while allowing designers to focus their creativity on the elements that truly need it.
Defining Composition and Prototyping Within Digital Production
Before we explore how composition and prototyping fit into the digital production workflow, it's helpful to define what these terms mean in the context of digital production—and why they matter.
Prototyping is the process of quickly creating low- to high-fidelity representations of a digital product to test and validate ideas before full development. It helps teams experiment with layouts, themes, and flows while reducing design and development cycles.
Composition is the act of assembling components and patterns into a complete product or interface.
All prototypes involve composition, but not all compositions are prototypes.
The Power of A Constrained Canvas
Most design tools offer some form of library-based composition and allow teams to create prototypes based on design files. However, when these activities take place in an infinite canvas, teams lose the structured foundation needed for a truly systematic, reusable production workflow.
It seems, then, that we should leverage tools for composition and prototyping that prioritize the ability to capture and operate strictly within the very intentional parameters or constraints your team has already designed, built, and implemented.
Embracing more structured, constrained tools for composition and prototyping has a number of benefits:
- Reduce redundant design work by working with real, functional building blocks.
- Avoid unnecessary complications by limiting design scope to critical bespoke UI.
- Ensure consistency by prototyping with the same components used in production.
- See exactly what will ship by working within the constraints of the end-user medium.
- Accelerate development by eliminating unnecessary handoffs and rework.
By working first within the established constraints of implemented themes and elements, teams are able to identify with total clarity what they actually need to work on. Instead of assembling full interfaces out of vector elements – most of which likely already exist in code – design teams can go as far as possible with existing solutions to inform what UI elements or patterns need to be custom built or adapted for the use case, feature, or application.
In this modernized workflow the process becomes:
- Compose and Prototype with what exists – Build interfaces with reusable, production ready components from the design system to quickly test and validate layouts and design decisions.
- Innovate where necessary – Identify areas that require new componentry or customization and focus design effort there.
- Move to development with confidence – Work with developers to ensure that what’s designed can be implemented seamlessly.
This evolution not only accelerates delivery and focuses resources on high-value activities, it entirely cuts out design activities that accidentally derail projects (like breaking components in Figma and forgetting to tell the devs…).
It’s worth belaboring the point that in this workflow–really any production workflow–developers should be brought into the process earlier. This is already done in part through use of code that is already built and approved, but it should also be done in the innovation stage. Bringing developers into the process earlier to ensure development constraints are considered. Early involvement of developers also allows for new components to be built with reusability in mind for future products.
A Purpose Built Solution
Knapsack is the only digital production platform that enables this integrated workflow because it is the only platform that dynamically connects design sources to coded components, allowing teams to compose interfaces that are also prototypes built out of production-ready code. You can share prototypes with team members to gather feedback and quickly iterate. For existing products, changes can be made easily through CI/CD integrations. For new products, Knapsack makes handing prototypes off for final production easier and faster.
It’s a vision of digital production we’ve had from the start and we’re continually evolving our platform and workflows to help organizations make the most of what connecting design and code can unlock.
While this shift can help teams move significantly faster (we’ve seen 30%+ increases in speed-to-market) it is also about building digital production and operations processes that are scalable, maintainable, and align design and development from day one. It’s about moving beyond abstract representations and working with the real building blocks of digital products.
See this workflow in action! Check out our self-guided tour to experience how composition and prototyping with production-ready components can transform your digital production process.
