I've been working on a domain-specific language for UI designers, called Matry.
The language is:
- platform agnostic
- component oriented
- designed to feel intuitive to non-technical users
I've been at the drawing board for a long time, stuck in syntax design. So I don't have a working prototype. But I do have a landing page and some documentation:
My philosophy is this: over the last decade or so, the design world has been attempting to get closer to developers and collaborate more closely. While there's a lot of excitement and energy from the design side to solve this problem, I don't see as much enthusiasm from the dev side. So what I'm trying to do is carve out a space in the software development toolchain specifically for designers - an approach I'm calling "design inclusion".
The real question is how to do this. Most attempts from the design side fall under two categories - making design tooling more programmatic (aka Figma), and introducing no-code or low-code tools. I think both of these fall short in various ways; it wouldn't be practical to list those reasons here. If this gap is going to be bridged, I think the solution has to come from engineers. We have to define an interface for design contribution, and over the years that I've spent thinking about this problem, I've come to the conclusion that a formal language is by far the most versatile and efficient way to create that bridge.
The language is:
I've been at the drawing board for a long time, stuck in syntax design. So I don't have a working prototype. But I do have a landing page and some documentation:https://matry.design/
https://github.com/matry/documentation
My philosophy is this: over the last decade or so, the design world has been attempting to get closer to developers and collaborate more closely. While there's a lot of excitement and energy from the design side to solve this problem, I don't see as much enthusiasm from the dev side. So what I'm trying to do is carve out a space in the software development toolchain specifically for designers - an approach I'm calling "design inclusion".
The real question is how to do this. Most attempts from the design side fall under two categories - making design tooling more programmatic (aka Figma), and introducing no-code or low-code tools. I think both of these fall short in various ways; it wouldn't be practical to list those reasons here. If this gap is going to be bridged, I think the solution has to come from engineers. We have to define an interface for design contribution, and over the years that I've spent thinking about this problem, I've come to the conclusion that a formal language is by far the most versatile and efficient way to create that bridge.