Innovation in Development Workflows: From UISL to CVA

In the fast-paced world of software development, efficiency is a critical competitive advantage. At Toki Labs, we don’t just adopt best practices; we actively innovate to create them. This drive has led to the development of proprietary tools that have fundamentally transformed our workflows, most notably our UI Specification Language (UISL) and the Controlled Generative Design (CVA) plugin for Figma.

These aren’t just internal curiosities; they represent our commitment to solving complex problems in novel ways, ultimately delivering better, faster, and more cost-effective solutions for our partners.

The Challenge: Bridging the Gap Between Design and Development

One of the most persistent friction points in software creation lies at the interface between design and development. Misinterpretations of design specifications, tedious manual creation of UI components, and inconsistencies in design systems can lead to significant delays and rework. We asked ourselves: how can we systematize and accelerate this crucial phase without sacrificing quality or creativity?

UISL: Engineering Clarity into UI Specifications

Our first major innovation in this space is UISL – the UI Specification Language. Born out of the need for unambiguous, machine-readable, yet human-friendly UI definitions, UISL has revolutionized how we approach front-end development.

What is UISL? UISL is a structured language that allows designers and developers to define UI components, layouts, and interactions with a high degree of precision. It acts as a single source of truth, ensuring that what is designed is what gets built.

The impact has been significant. Clear, formal specifications minimize misunderstandings between design and development teams, reducing ambiguity that often leads to costly revisions. Developers can work more efficiently from precise blueprints, often enabling partial automation of component scaffolding. This ensures UI elements are implemented consistently across the application. Most importantly, the adoption of UISL has led to an average reduction of 50% in UI specification and initial component development time on our projects.

Instead of relying solely on visual mockups and lengthy annotations, UISL provides a structured, verifiable layer that streamlines the entire handoff process.

CVA for Figma: Supercharging Design System Creation with Semantic AI

Building on our success with UISL, we turned our attention to the creation and maintenance of Design Systems – the cornerstone of scalable and consistent product design.

The Bottleneck of Traditional Design Systems: Creating a comprehensive design system is often a labor-intensive process. Defining tokens, components, variants, and responsive behaviors for every element can take weeks, if not months. Maintaining consistency as the system grows adds another layer of complexity.

Enter CVA (Controlled Generative Design): Our CVA plugin for Figma leverages rule-based semantic AI to automate and accelerate significant portions of Design System creation.

CVA works through semantic understanding. It comprehends the relationships and rules within a design, such as how spacing scales, how color palettes are applied thematically, and how component variants relate to each other. Based on a few core definitions and rules set by the designer, CVA can generate a vast array of component variants and responsive states, ensuring consistency and adherence to the defined system. Unlike purely generative AI tools that might produce unpredictable results, CVA operates within the constraints and rules defined by the design team, ensuring brand alignment and usability.

The benefits have been transformative. CVA has been shown to reduce the time required for initial Design System creation by up to 70%. Automated generation minimizes human error and ensures all components adhere strictly to the system’s rules, enhancing consistency across the board. Designers can explore variations and iterate on the design system much faster, enabling rapid iteration. Most importantly, it frees up designers from repetitive tasks to focus on higher-level strategic design challenges, truly empowering them to do their best work.

The Toki Labs Philosophy: Innovate, Implement, Improve

UISL and CVA are not isolated achievements. They are a testament to our core philosophy at Toki Labs. We continuously analyze our own processes to identify real-world bottlenecks and find areas for improvement. Then we leverage our deep technical expertise to engineer practical solutions that solve these problems effectively. We quantify the impact of our innovations and continuously refine them, measuring results rather than just implementing for the sake of innovation. Finally, while these tools were born from internal needs, the principles behind them – clarity, automation, and intelligent assistance – inform how we approach every partner project, sharing the benefits with everyone we work with.

Conclusion: The Future of Efficient Development

By investing in tools like UISL and CVA, Toki Labs is not just optimizing its internal workflows; we are pushing the boundaries of how design and development can collaborate more effectively. This commitment to innovation means our partners benefit from faster delivery times, higher quality products, and more efficient use of resources.

We believe the future of development lies in augmenting human expertise with intelligent tools, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of this evolution, building not just software, but smarter ways to build software.