Luthier

Invented a no-code graphics-automation process at Amazon scale — a Figma widget that turns a design into a production template, with no engineer required.

Role

Sole engineer and designer — frontend, backend, and UX. Ideation, requirements, prototyping, usability testing, and delivery.

Stack

React · functional JavaScript · Ruby on Rails · Figma API.

Shipped

First version in 12 weeks; beta-tested with 15 template designers.

The problem

Composer is Amazon-internal software that automates marketing-graphic production: templates become pixel-perfect graphics, and it makes over 50,000 marketing images a year for placements including the Amazon Gateway.

When I joined, each template was hand-coded by a front-end engineer — a slow, expensive, unmaintainable process. To scale it, a designer needed to be able to make a template without writing any code.

The move: Figma is the interface. A designer builds a Figma document; a widget sends it to Composer, which parses every layer into a working template — UI and all.

How it works

Figma parsing

A Figma→Composer transformer walks the document tree — text, images, shapes — and builds both the template and its editing UI from the layers.

Layout by Figma

It interprets Figma's own layout features (auto-layout, alignment) and transforms them to Composer CSS, so designers use tools they already know.

Annotations

A small annotation system supplies what Figma can't infer — e.g. which images the end user may replace vs. fixed brand logos, max file sizes, text limits.

Modes

Figma Component Sets become template modes (a holiday background variant, say) — with a mode switch generated automatically, even for nested sets.

Engineering

Two core modules. The transformer reads the Figma doc from the REST API and converts it to a Composer JSON with a single pure function, getComposerDoc — a tree traversal that collects the layers, UI, and initial state. The renderer takes that JSON and produces the template.

I built the JSON schema and renderer first, to cut manual template-coding — then realized I could plug Figma in as the authoring interface on top of it. That reframe is the whole project.

Outcome

I interviewed template designers across AWS, Alexa, Amazon Business, Payments, and Fresh; wrote the proposal; and built the transformer, the CRUD app, and the backend in 12 weeks. I launched a beta and ran usability studies with 15 designers — feedback was positive, and it surfaced the bugs and features that became the roadmap.

In early 2023 my team was re-orged to focus on mechanizing Amazon's shopping design system, and Composer graduated to another team. The question I took with me — how do you help distributed teams build consistent experiences without hand-coding each one — is the direct line to Stores Designer.