The 90% Handoff: How Designers Are Now Building HubSpot Websites
The 90% Handoff: How Designers Are Building Websites Before Developers Even Start
Tools like transjt.ai are blurring the lines between design and development, empowering designers to deliver a nearly-finished product.
For decades, we’ve accepted a fundamental "Great Divide" in web production. On one side are the designers, living in the visual, conceptual world of Figma. On the other are the developers, living in the structural, logical world of code and content management systems like HubSpot.
The bridge between these two worlds has always been the "handoff"—a process notoriously slow, expensive, and fraught with mistranslation. The designer hands over a beautiful picture of a website, and the developer begins the long, manual process of rebuilding it from scratch in code. This is the old Figma to HubSpot CMS workflow.
But what if the handoff wasn't a blueprint? What if it was a pre-fabricated house, 90% complete, just waiting for the plumbing and electricity to be connected?
A new generation of AI tools is making this a reality, and it's radically transforming the role of the designer.
From Visualist to Architect
The primary shift is this: designers are no longer just visualists; they are becoming architects.
In the past, a developer would look at a Figma file and have to manually translate every visual element. They’d write the HTML for the structure, the CSS for the styles, and the HubL to create the custom fields in the HubSpot CMS. This is the 80-90% of the project that consumes the most time and budget.
This is the exact part of the process that tools like transjt.ai are automating.
transjt.ai is an AI-powered platform that understands both languages: Figma's design-system logic (like auto-layout and components) and HubSpot's CMS logic (modules, themes, and editable fields). It perfects the Figma to HubSpot CMS conversion.
A designer who builds a component in Figma is already thinking about structure, responsiveness, and content. Now, instead of just documenting that structure for a developer, the designer can use a tool like transjt.ai to directly generate that structure as a production-ready HubSpot theme.
The designer is no longer just handing over a picture. They are building the actual, functional foundation of the website. They are preparing 80-90% of the entire project before a developer even opens their code editor.
The New "10% Polish" Handoff
This new workflow completely redefines the role of the developer and the nature of the handoff. The project is no longer "thrown over the wall" for a full build. Instead, it’s a "baton pass" for the final 10-20% of the work.
When the designer has already delivered a fully-coded, responsive theme, the developer is freed from the most tedious part of their job. Their role becomes elevated. They are no longer manual translators; they are senior technical specialists.
This final "polish" phase is where the developer’s high-value skills come in. They are now focused on connecting complex, third-party APIs, writing custom serverless functions, integrating the site with external CRMs like Salesforce, or performing enterprise-level security and performance audits. They are handling the complex integrations that AI can't, while the designer has handled the entire front-end build.
The Power of the "Full-Stack Designer"
This shift is incredibly empowering for designers. For the first time, the person with the visual vision has true control over the final, functional product. They can ensure their design is implemented with 100% fidelity because they are the one building the foundation.
This creates a new role: the "full-stack designer." This is a designer who can not only create a beautiful user interface in Figma but also, with the help of AI, build the entire front-end and CMS structure of a HubSpot website.
This isn't a future-state fantasy. It's happening right now. The divide between design and development isn't just being bridged; it's being erased. The result is a workflow that is faster, cheaper, and produces a better end-product, all by empowering designers to take their vision 90% of the way to the finish line.
Ship custom HubSpot CMS themes up 17x faster
transjt.ai uses AI to generate production-ready HubSpot CMS themes, cutting build time by up to 80–90%—with clean, editable code and brand-safe components.