Not long ago, I caught myself reflecting one of my previous work experiences, all those intense design sprints and late-evening iteration sessions. What floated to the surface wasn’t a particular launch or award, but the quiet, nagging memory of just how many prototypes my team created that never made it past our own screens.
One project sticks out: Twenty-three “final” versions of a single user flow.
Twenty-three.
I remember that exact number because it became an inside joke among colleagues. Many different approaches to the same problem, each one building on the last, each one more polished than the previous iteration.
We poured ourselves into them. Pixel-perfect micro-interactions, user journeys so smooth they felt like silk under your cursor, clever solutions to gnarly interaction problems that seemed impossible a week earlier. And then… the development team completed the implementation.
I opened the staging app and barely recognized it: none of it made it through.
Functionally? Sure, it worked. You could get from A to B. But it was a shadow of what we'd designed—a utilitarian ghost of the creative vision we'd spent months perfecting. All those evenings crafting the perfect transition, all those little moments of delight we’d fought for? Vanished without ceremony.
This is the prototype graveyard: where beautiful design goes to die.
The handoff illusion
We like to think this problem is solved. Figma Dev Mode, Zeplin, Abstract—dozens of tools promise “seamless handoff.” We export assets, annotate specs, and write documentation thick enough to rival an encyclopedia. For a moment, it feels like the vision might actually make it across the bridge.
But here's what actually happens.
A developer opens the file and spots an animation that would take three days to code, with a sprint deadline in two. Fade transition it is.
Your intricate, custom dropdown? Swapped for a library component that’s “close enough.”
Each cut has its reasons. Each compromise makes sense in isolation. But death by a thousand cuts is still death.
The translation problem
The real issue isn’t tooling—it’s translation. Designers and developers are speaking different languages.
Designers think in flows, states, and experiences. Developers think in components, data, and logic. Prototypes lives in “design-land”, product lives in “code-land”, and in between is a wide ocean.
Tools try to build bridges across that ocean: CSS generation, component libraries, pixel-perfect specs. But it’s still translation. And something always gets lost in translation.
So… what if there were no translation at all?
When prototypes become documentation
Here’s the irony: the more polished your prototype, the more painful the handoff feels.
Your weeks of careful work become a museum exhibit—beautiful but inert. Developers keep the link bookmarked, open it now and then, but the living product moves on without it. Bugs reshape flows. New requirements rewrite layouts. Performance tweaks blunt the edges of your interactions. The prototype becomes increasingly irrelevant: a historical artifact of good intentions.
I’ve seen teams burn more hours maintaining design docs than doing actual design. Keeping prototypes in sync with production becomes a full-time job that nobody wants. So we give up. The graveyard grows.
The cost of beautiful waste
This isn’t just about hurt feelings or creative frustration: it’s expensive.
Every hour spent crafting interactions that won't ship is wasted labor. Every clever solution that dies in handoff is lost innovation. Each “good enough” that makes it into production is a degraded user experience.
And there’s a cultural cost too. Once designers realize their work won’t survive implementation, they stop pushing boundaries. Once developers know they’ll be rebuilding from scratch anyway, they disengage from design intent. The healthy tension that sparks breakthroughs is replaced by a quiet, weary acceptance.
Teams start designing only for what’s easy to build, not for what should exist. That’s how innovation dies—quietly, not from lack of ideas, but from lack of belief that ideas can survive the journey to production.
What comes after handoff
I keep circling back to those 23 prototypes. All that creative energy. All those solved problems. All of it trapped in a Figma file.
What if prototypes didn’t have to die? What if the beautiful interaction you designed could become the shipped experience — without a cliff between the two worlds?
That question stuck with me long enough that I couldn’t let it go. So together with another foolish guy — my co-founder at Qwirklabs — we started tinkering with ideas here and there, and eventually arrived at something we’re calling Smoothie Studio.
It’s not another handoff tool—it’s a shared environment where prototypes and production code live together, pulling from the same underlying data. You can design on the canvas, or code in the editor, but you’re working on the same living product.
The goal is simple: prototypes that grow up instead of growing old.
Building the bridge
We're still early in this exploration, but the technical foundation is becoming clear. The key insight is that design and development aren't separate phases—they're different views of the same creative process.
In Smoothie Studio, designing an interaction isn’t a handoff—it’s the real thing. When you prototype a dropdown, that exact dropdown is already live in code. When you sketch a flow, you’re building the actual flow users will click through. Design view, code view, user view—they’re just different lenses on the same living product.
This isn’t about replacing developers or forcing designers to code. It’s about giving both the same living artifact to work on, each contributing their expertise without losing anything in translation.
The end of the graveyard
I want to live in a world where those 23 prototypes could have evolved into 23 iterations of a shipped experience. Where creative exploration doesn't end at the handoff wall. Where the best ideas survive the journey to production, not getting buried along the way.
The graveyard exists because we’ve accepted the split between design and development as inevitable. It isn’t. The tools are finally catching up to the vision of a shared creative workflow.
Those beautiful prototypes don’t have to die. They just need a place to keep growing.
Building Smoothie Studio is teaching me that the biggest barriers to great products aren't technical—they're structural. We're working (or at least trying) to tear down the walls between creative disciplines, one unified workspace at a time.
What’s in your prototype graveyard? Which designs are you still mourning—and if you could bring one back to life, which would it be? Reply here or find me on X @RedRamie00. I’d love to hear your stories.