Why should I use Notion to document my design system?
You should use the tools that work best for your team. Many of the best product teams in the world are using Notion as a knowledge base for their organization.
It was a no-brainer for us to choose Notion as a new Destination for Specify to help you automatically:
Document your brand guidelines in Notion
Create public pages for press and brand kits
Automate the maintenance of your design system documentation
Where your design data is coming from
The design tokens and assets you'll be distributing to Notion must be collected from Sources beforehand (e.g., Figma).
How to add Notion as a destination
Add Notion in Specify
Go to your Specify repository your want to extract design data from
Go to Destinations and click on
Add destination
Select Notion as your destination in the first step
Connect your Notion account
Select your Notion workspace by clicking on
Connect workspace
Choose which pages you want to give Specify access to
Select the token type you want to synchronize (only colors, vectors, and bitmaps are supported for now)
Choose if you want to duplicate our design system documentation Notion template or continue without it
Check how to use our Notion template in this other article.
Choose if you want to sync your design data in an existing database (e.g. using a template) or create a new one from scratch
Give the link of your existing Notion database OR the link of the Notion page you want your design data to be distributed to
Validate it and see your design data distributed inside a Notion database on your Notion page 🎉
Due to Notion API's limitations, your first synchronization might take several minutes.
You should then see a new database created by Specify with your design data if you choose to create one from scratch (here I chose to distribute colors).
Do's and don'ts
🚫 Don't edit existing database columns created by Specify
All columns and values created by Specify will automatically be overridden by Specify following each synchronization between Specify and your Notion pages.
🚫 Don't edit values in the SpecifyId column
Updating values in the SpecifyId column will break the synchronization between Specify and your Notion document. We recommend you hide this column in your view.
✅ You can add and edit custom columns in the generated database
You mustn't update existing columns and values created by Specify but you're free to add any custom column to the generated database. Specify will ignore them and they will remain as is after each synchronization.
Go further by creating linked databases
You can create linked databases on other pages that will call the original database created by Specify. They will always be in sync!
For example, you can start with a Brand Guidelines Notion page and insert a linked database referring to the database Specify generated. That way, you can choose the display (like a gallery) or filters you’d like to describe and document those colors.