Inside the Making of Sixelf

Design is more than just an act of creation, it’s a journey of iteration, growth, and impact. We recognized the need for designers to track, showcase, and celebrate their contributions, so we created Sixelf. Inspired by platforms like GitHub’s contribution tracker, Sixelf translates that concept into the design world, creating a unique space where creativity meets functionality. 

By connecting your Figma account, Sixelf provides an innovative way for designers to visualize their daily design efforts through intuitive heatmaps while offering a host of other features to amplify their digital presence.

Challenge

Before Sixelf, designers lacked a platform to document and reflect on their work. Most projects/design work are lost or restricted either due to NDAs or deletion. 

From our research, designers would duplicate projects before handoff but they struggled to consolidate their contributions across these projects especially when other designers were on these projects, leaving their efforts scattered and underrepresented. 

While developers benefited from tools like GitHub’s activity tracker, designers had no equivalent tailored to their needs. Existing tools primarily catered to teams, with limited focus on individual achievements. We set out to fill this gap by creating a solution that allows designers to:

1. Track their daily design contributions.
2. Hold on to a piece of your work even when access is revoked by the client
3. Showcase featured projects in a visually compelling way.
4. Integrate seamlessly with their existing tools and workflows.
5. Be able to have first hand insights on their design journey

Solution

We built Sixelf to empower individual designers by giving them a platform to showcase their work in a structured yet creative format. Here’s how:

1. Visual Contribution Heatmaps: Inspired by GitHub’s contribution graphs, Sixelf generates heatmaps that visualize design activity over time. By connecting their Figma accounts, designers can see a clear representation of their productivity, enabling them to identify patterns and reflect on their workflow.
2. Customizable Profiles: Users can create free profiles to share their professional identity. Profiles include social media links, bios, and featured projects, making it easy to showcase their skills and personality.
3. Embedding and Exporting: Designers can embed their Sixelf heatmaps directly on their portfolio websites or export them as images to include in presentations and resumes, extending the utility of their tracked contributions.
4. Seamless Figma Integration: With the ability to connect multiple Figma accounts, Sixelf ensures that designers can capture all their contributions across different organizations and personal projects.

5. Figma Wrapped: Sixelf’s year-in-review feature, Figma Wrapped, provides designers with a personalized summary of their annual achievements. This report highlights key milestones, most active months, day they were most productive, their designer archetype based on their stats and offering an opportunity to celebrate progress and share insights with peers. We just made the first wrapped for designers this year (2024)
6. Project Highlights: Users can spotlight their most impactful projects, adding a personal touch to their profiles and making their work easily discoverable.

Design Approach

Sixelf’s design philosophy revolves around simplicity, elegance, and usability. We aimed to create a visually engaging platform without overwhelming users with unnecessary complexity. Key elements of the design approach include:

1. Visual Storytelling: Heatmaps and featured projects provide a visually rich narrative of a designer’s contributions and progress, ensuring their work is engagingly presented.
2. User-Centric Simplicity: Focused on reducing clutter, Sixelf balances functionality with an intuitive, visually clean experience that encourages exploration and usability.
3. Responsive Design: The platform’s interface adapts seamlessly across devices, ensuring a consistent experience whether accessed on desktop or mobile.

Technical Approach

Sixelf was built with scalability, reliability, and user convenience in mind. Key technical considerations include:

1. Fire and Forget: The Sixelf service is designed to be synchronous. This means that you can initiate the process of importing your files and teams, and we will handle it in the background without disrupting your flow as you explore the rest of the application. We also automatically import new contributions every day so you don’t have to do it yourself.
2. Scalable Architecture: We designed Sixelf to scale to handle millions of contributions without compromising on speed, and we are constantly improving the performance of our application as the community expands.
3. Fault Tolerant: In the rare event of a system failure, we have several measures put in place to safeguard your information from corruption and we create redundant backups periodically, hoping that we never have to use them, of course.
4. Privacy-First Approach: We prioritized user privacy, ensuring that sensitive project data remains secure and only public-facing information is shared on profiles. We also give you full control over your data by allowing you to delete your files, teams, and even your Figma accounts.

Impact

Since its launch on May 18th 2024, Sixelf has become an essential tool for designers seeking to quantify and present their creative efforts. The platform has:

1. Enabled 870+ designers track over 470k contributions gaining deeper insights into their productivity patterns.
2. Provided a visually appealing way to showcase their achievements.
3. Enhanced the professional presence of countless users by offering an embeddable, shareable, and customizable profile solution.

Future Outlook

The journey doesn’t end here. We are continuously exploring ways to expand Sixelf’s capabilities. Planned updates include:

• Introducing advanced analytics to provide deeper insights into design trends and workflow efficiency.
• Expanding integrations to include other popular design tools.
• Enhancing collaboration features to allow teams to celebrate their collective impact.

Conclusion & Credits

Thrilled to officially launch Sixelf! This wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible effort of everyone who helped bring this vision to life. A huge thank you to:

Sixelf is more than a platform, it’s a celebration of creativity and effort. By giving designers the tools to track, showcase, and reflect on their work, Sixelf is shaping the future of design documentation and recognition. Whether you’re an individual designer or part of a larger team, Sixelf is your companion in visualizing and sharing the story of your creativity.