Case study / 03Toyota · AI Tooling

Figma MCP Plugin.

Role
Creator: concept, design, development
Team
Solo build, adopted by the Toyota design team
Platform
Claude, Cursor, Figma plugin, MCP, Ellipse
Outcome
Brief to explorations in minutes
The challenge

Designers were spending their first day on every project assembling layouts from parts the system already knew.

Ellipse made components consistent, but starting a page was still manual: pull components, place them, wire up the grid, repeat for every variation a stakeholder wants to see.

AI tools can generate layouts, but generic output ignores your design system. The problem worth solving was generation inside the system, where everything produced already follows the tokens and composition rules we enforce.

The approach

Three moves that mattered
01

Connect the model to the system

An MCP server exposes Ellipse's components and rules directly to the model, so generation composes real parts instead of inventing lookalikes.

02

Generate directions, not comps

From a single prompt, the plugin produces multi-breakpoint layouts and variations. Designers spend their time judging and refining instead of assembling.

03

Keep the designer in charge

Everything lands as native, editable Figma layers built from library components. The plugin proposes. The designer decides.

The outcome

Early results: layouts in minutes, and every one of them already on system.

The plugin is in active development, built in parallel with the Ellipse component migration. It already generates multi-breakpoint page layouts from a single prompt, with components that follow Ellipse token and composition rules, dramatically cutting the time from brief to first explorations.

The quality of what gets generated is only as good as the system underneath it. That part doesn't get talked about much in conversations about AI design tools, and it's why the Ellipse rebuild had to come first.

Minutes
From brief to first explorations
1 prompt
Multi-breakpoint layouts on canvas
On system
Follows Ellipse tokens and composition