If you’re wondering if Elyx for you, then a good place to start is right here, where Marcelo shares some of our philosophy and thinking being what we’re building ↓
here's an extract from a discussion i was having in the @elyxdesign's discord with a beta tester. if you've been wondering what elyx is all about, what it does, what it doesn't do, etc. then this might help you too!
elyx thrives if you treat your designs a little more like code components. even more so when they share a direct relationship with their code counterparts (e.g. button.elyx vs button.tsx).
building a source of truth takes a little bit of discipline. which, let's be honest, for a very long time many of us designers had very little accountability for. we'd work in our corners, name layers however we wanted, break things into pieces based mostly on what made sense visually, often without a very good understanding of how the product was actually being built in code.
that was mostly fine when design and implementation were two separate worlds. someone would eventually translate one into the other. but i think that model makes less and less sense now.
if design is becoming something that teammates, agents and code all need to understand and operate on, then the structure itself starts to matter a lot more. names matter. boundaries matter. files matter. the relationship between a component in design and a component in code matters.
that's a big part of why elyx can sometimes feel a bit more like an ide than a traditional design tool. it's not really trying to make the canvas less free (you can still throw whatever you want in there) but the surrounding structure is nudging you toward making things legible beyond just the canvas itself.
the question for us becomes less, "how do we get you to design more before coding?" and more, "how can elyx stay useful while design and code keep feeding into each other?"
that's probably the part i'm personally most excited about. not treating elyx as the place where design happens before development, but as something that can live alongside the project while it gets built.
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When your files aren’t locked away, it turns out your dot can do pretty much anything with them.
(Still not sure about Latin-first as a localization strategy, though.)
Of course I had to play with @OpenAI’s Dots. @elyxdesign works like a charm with it. I can ask for new designs from anywhere. Mobile, Slack, it all works. Elyx: Where design means more. Or as one would say, “Ubi ars designandi plus valet” (apparently).
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Had a couple of questions about visual diffs. Marcelo has your answer ↓
i think at this point, you may have seen a tweet or two about how cool and friendly the @elyxdesign file format is for agents and git diffs.
yet, here’s the same diff… for your eyes.
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An .elyx file is a structured, readable description of product design. And while Elyx’s main surface might be a canvas, we’re not hiding that language away behind an MCP server.
You can work with the Elyx language using agents, the CLI, or directly in code view.
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Elyx retweeted
Awesome to see how @elyxdesign can help designers to start dipping their toes bit by bit into what traditionally are more development areas.
I've been dogfooding @elyxdesign on a few personal projects. Playing now with my portfolio:
Git + Claude (code, only!) + Astro + Netlify (I barely knew most of these before Elyx 😄).
Baby steps yet, but it's been nice seeing my stuff on a browser after drawing on the Elyx canvas
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Yep, there’s a canvas you can design on. It’s got all the tools you’d expect (and a few you might not…).
I’ve had a few comments asking about @elyxdesign’s canvas.
It’s just a canvas. Drag things, move things, edit things, scroll things...
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Elyx retweeted
Another Jev experiment in @elyxdesign; describe in natural language what you want to select on the canvas. A quick decision model really opens up opportunities that 'traditional' LLMs were just too slow for. Exciting
Payed a bit with Jev today. First one of many experiments today in @elyxdesign. Jev is great at classifying data - so it can figure out where my icons should live and keep them organised so I don’t have to
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Instant Elyx project organization, with a little help from @typesafeai ↓
Payed a bit with Jev today. First one of many experiments today in @elyxdesign. Jev is great at classifying data - so it can figure out where my icons should live and keep them organised so I don’t have to
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Elyx feature sneak preview: Collections are insanely useful, whether you’re working solo or with others. @MarceloMarfil has all the details for you ↓
a little eod @elyxdesign sneak peek?
this is collections. on the surface, just a way to gather and browse things. but you can bend it into all sorts of useful stuff:
- see what your team edited recently
- flag files that need attention
- build a proper iconography browser
- get a git-modified overview of the files you changed
basically, a feature for making more features. my favorite kind.
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There’s a lesson, and a feature teaser, in every @cjdowner post. Look closely…
In Elyx, these three folders set you up:
📁 Controls – the UI basics
📁 Blocks – groups of controls
📁 Screens – complete views
Each component gets its own file. Import controls into blocks, and blocks into screens.
Small pieces 🪢 connected.
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Elyx retweeted
I am sending a new wave of invites for @elyxdesign today, if you'd like to have access, comment with a little brief of the kind of work you're doing at the moment and i'll make sure to prioritize you!
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Chris has been going deep on tokens over the past few months, and we’ve covered a lot of ground as a result.
(So far we’re supporting colors, numbers, images, and text/strings)
I want to talk about tokens. In Elyx, they’re a first-class citizen.
A dedicated space to manage and edit them visually. Create aliases and control their opacity. Add contexts that let your designs adapt to themes, languages, and more.
Coming soon ~ elyx.design
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Elyx retweeted
do you mean… like… this?
Hm very interesting, so if I import an elyx file into another elyx file. Then 3 months later edit that og elyx file, the file that got ported into the other elyx file also gets updated? So they are always linked together as a component system? Is there like a graph view to visualize the interlocking/relational system of elyx files on a project?
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Elyx retweeted
There were a few different moments that started us on our journey to building Elyx. These moments shaped what we’d go onto build. A few folks have asked about our inspiration and how it came to be, so I thought I’d write some more about it.
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There's a lot to talk about with Elyx, so let’s start with a big idea that underpins pretty much everything else: Your project is the unit of design, not your document.
Elyx works best when your designs start small and build up. Individual components combine to become blocks, blocks combine to become screens. You bring screens together to form flows. Everything lives in its own file.
You can import any .elyx file into another. It makes building designs in this modular way easier and more logical. Changes you make to one .elyx file cascade to anywhere else you import them.
Over time, working like this builds a living, breathing home for your decision. Everything stays up to date, and everything stays right alongside (and in sync with) your code.
We’re just scratching the surface here, and we’ve got plenty more to share with you.
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Elyx retweeted
Thank you all who subscribed to @elyxdesign, I couldn't be more thankful, your support went above and beyond my expectations, but... I now have a problem.
I just didn't expect to get this many sign ups on day 1, and this forces me to change plans on how we roll out access, hear me out ->
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