Ditto 2.0 - Single source of truth for copy from idea to design to code

Hey everyone! Jessica here, co-founder of Ditto. The whole Ditto team is so excited to share with you all something we’ve been heads down working on over the last few months — Ditto 2.0 🥳 Before we dive into what Ditto 2.0 means, let’s take a step back. Over our last 2.5 years building and growing Ditto (with the support of an amazing community of product people from designers to writers to developers!), we’ve seen teams that integrate Ditto into their workflows completely shift their thinking about two core things: 1. The importance of text in building user-facing product 2. The ability to systemize their text into components We’ve been so excited to see everything from teams building expansive text component libraries in Ditto to having Ditto manage every user-facing string in development. 🤯  As Ditto became a core part of teams’ workflows, from design to development, we knew that there was one core aspect of the product copy lifecycle that Ditto didn’t handle: ideation. 💡 The crucial part of the workflow where it was important to move quickly, iterate, and be able to draft things out. 🏃🏻‍♀️💨 Teams were still drafting their text in tools like GDocs, Word, and Notion before bringing it over to Ditto to handle the process from when the mockups get created. We asked ourselves: how can we have the best of both worlds — a lightweight text editor with a powerful content system that managed text across a design and development? 🤔 ⚖️ After months of hard work, iteration, and user feedback, we’re so excited to share with you all our answer to that question: Drafting in Ditto. Drafting allows teams to draft text in a collaborative text editor before any mockups are created. Afterward, teams can “enable linking” to sync it with mockups in Figma, fetch it via our developer integrations, or link it up with their existing component system. It’s such a huge expansion from Ditto’s existing functionality that we’re calling it Ditto 2.0. Anyone can start a draft project in Ditto to begin writing their text. If you get to try it out, please let us know how it works for your team! We’re super excited to be able to grow from feedback, and we can’t wait to see it in teams’ workflows. ❤️

Exciting! :) How about variants for non-Figma linked projects? That would help us to also handle content translation for our emails in Hubspot - and thereby we would put the last piece of the puzzle and get all our content in one place. Thank you for all the good work you do!

Jo here, the other co-founder of Ditto! A little over 2 years ago, we launched Ditto right here on PH. We didn’t really know what to expect or what the reaction would be — we just knew that we had personally experienced how powerful but also undervalued copy was and were building something to fix that. That day, we learned that a lot of people felt the exact same way! 😊 Since then, we’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of support the community has given us as we’ve navigated building a tool in a space that didn’t really exist before. With your feedback, we’ve been able to launch things like Ditto components, variants, and our first developer tools, all in service of making copy a first-class citizen when building product. Thousands of teams have used Ditto to build their (often first-ever!) content source of truth. Today’s launch feels especially momentous because it opens Ditto up to everyone to use. You no longer need to be on Figma or any other specific tool to get started. We’re so excited about all the possibilities that drafting in Ditto unlocks and all the things we (and the community!) will be able to build on top of the foundation that is Ditto 2.0. We have big plans for the future, and can’t wait to share more with you all! ❤️ The whole team who helped bring this to life (@jordin_builds, @xavier_agostini, @ashley_newman1, @robinson_claireb) will be online all day to answer any and all questions. :) We can't wait to hear what you think! 🥳

Wooooooo!!!!!!!11!!!!!!1! So excited to see this amazing update. Congratulations on the launch and on all your progress over the last few years. You've brought something truly valuable into the world and I love seeing so many teams engaging and responding to it. 👏👏👏👏👏

The team and I worked hard to get Drafting out and cannot be more excited for everyone to start using it 😊 Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of this launch thus far!

This launch represents multiple months of hard work from everyone on our team, and we're all stoked to finally share the fruits of our labor with the world! 🎉 I believe that the ability to draft text directly in Ditto is a MASSIVE boon to product development teams. For writers: a lightweight text editor automatically tracks the history of every piece of copy you write, correctly attributing all edits to the users on your team who make them. When your drafted copy is ready to be used outside of Ditto, the click of a button turns your draft text into fully featured Ditto text items, complete with the ability to use variables, pluralization, variants, components, and more. For engineers: since text that lives inside of Ditto isn't constrained to copy in design files, a codebase integrated with Ditto is freed from the same limitation. We've also made a series of systemic modifications that pave the way for new features that will dramatically increase the power that development teams have when working with text in Ditto. Stay tuned :) Super excited to field feedback and/or questions!

Wow, congratulations on the launch!

Congrats on the v2 launch. Great to see neat tools to facilitate the collaboration between UX writers. designers and engineers. The right problem to solve. 👏 We use something I think called Phrase but it's really cumbersome and our devs worked on a plugin themselves.

Love this! Congrats Jessica and Jolena :)

Congratulations, you are doing an amazing job! It's a significant and much-needed improvement. Btw, are you planning to introduce the possibility of applying variants to several frames simultaneously?