There's always a gap between what a design looks like in Figma and what actually ships. Usually the designer blames the developer for not paying attention, and the developer blames the designer for drawing something that was never really buildable in the first place. Both are half right, and neither complaint fixes anything.
A raw Figma file without that layer is a picture of an outcome, not a specification.
Treat the design like a system, not a picture
The fix isn't better communication in the abstract - it's handing over rules instead of a static image. Spacing, type scale, and exact colour values need to be defined once and referenced everywhere, so a 16px padding value is 16px on every screen it appears on, not "close enough" three different ways across three different screens. A raw Figma file without that layer is a picture of an outcome, not a specification a developer can build from with confidence.
Design the states nobody drew
The screens that get skipped are usually the ones that matter most in production: what does this table look like with zero rows in it? What happens when a name is forty characters long and wraps twice? If the designer doesn't decide that in advance, the developer will guess under deadline pressure, and the guess is rarely the one you'd have picked.
- Empty states - no data yet, not an error
- Loading states - what's visible while something is still resolving
- Error states - what a failed action actually tells the user
- Edge-case content - very long names, very long numbers, zero results
Let the build cost show up before the deadline does
The single highest-leverage habit is getting a developer to look at a design before it's declared final. If one specific animation or transition is going to take forty hours to implement well, that's worth knowing while it's still a design decision rather than a commitment already promised to a client. Whether it's worth the budget becomes a real conversation instead of a surprise.
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