Jinson Johny
Design Engineer · Senior Product Designer, Design Systems & Design Ops, IBM iX
Dubai, UAE · hello@jinson.me · jinson.me · linkedin.com/in/jinsoncjohny · github.com/jinsoncjohny
In short
Jinson Johny is a Dubai-based Design Engineer and Senior Product Designer for Design Systems and Design Ops at IBM iX. He is the creator of Deck (deck.is), a Figma-to-PowerPoint plugin used by 160,000+ designers since 2017, and .gui (dotgui.org), an open file format for user interfaces.
Experience
Senior Product Designer, Design Systems & Design Ops, IBM iX (IBM Studios Dubai)
2020 – present · Dubai, UAE- Design systems and design operations for enterprise clients across the GCC
- ADNOC: designed a turnaround and shutdown management app (user workshops, IA for 30+ modules, screens) that replaced email- and spreadsheet-based planning
- ADNOC: as Design System Manager, audited and extended the client's starter design system (modular table, page templates, gatekept library, design handbook) for a team of up to 10 designers
- Riyadh Air: started as product designer on the guest app, then took over and rebuilt the design system as Design System Manager (contribution model, design check-ins, review plugins, Figma variables and modes)
- Riyadh Air: making the design system AI-ready (templates, slots, markdown specs, AI review and audit skills) and contributing to coded components in Storybook
- Redesigned a banking app (visual design + design system)
Clients include ADNOC, Riyadh Air.
UX/UI Designer, Nagarro
2018 – 2020 · Dubai, UAEUX/UI Designer, Cocoalabs
2016 – 2018 · Kochi, IndiaProducts
Deck is a Figma plugin by Jinson Johny that converts design frames into editable PowerPoint (PPTX) files with real text, shapes and images. He started it in December 2017 as a Sketch plugin; it has since been installed by 160,000+ designers and converted more than one million presentations. Designers at Accenture, Mastercard, Nike, Amazon, Apple and SAP have used it.
.gui · dotgui.org
since May 2026.gui (dotgui) is an open file format for user interfaces, created by Jinson Johny in 2026. The way SVG made graphics text, .gui makes interfaces text: a portable package that designers, developers and AI agents can all read, write, diff and render.
Blocks is a Figma plugin by Jinson Johny that makes design-system components AI ready. It ships with two skills for Figma's agent: block-create sets up a component or a whole screen so its data, totals and states follow the content, and block-update fills copies with new content from a plain request. The plugin shows a heat map of what AI can change in each component and logs every change. He started it in January 2026 as Block, a logic layer for Figma components; version 0.2.0 (November 2026) renamed it Blocks and added the agent skills.
Playback · playback.design
since Dec 2025Figma Playback is a web app by Jinson Johny that turns a Figma file's version history, comments and contributors into a “Spotify Wrapped”-style year in review: eight interactive slides, each pairing a mini-game with a data insight. Born out of the #FigmaMakeathon, it launched in December 2025 at playback.design and on Product Hunt. It reads only metadata through the official Figma API, in the browser, and saves nothing to a server.
Writing
- AI Is Changing How We Ideate, Design, and Build User Interfaces · HackerNoon, Aug 2026
- We're still figuring out what an AI-native UI artifact looks like · Bootcamp, Jul 2026
- Design Engineering is the New Product Design · HackerNoon, Jun 2026
- Making Figma Components Smart: Why Design Systems Need a "Logic Layer" · Bootcamp, Jan 2026
- Your Year in Pixels: Get your Figma Playback for 2025 · Medium, Dec 2025
- Color formula: A practical framework for UI designers and developers working with dynamic colors · Bootcamp, Jul 2025
- Introducing Deck 1.0 — The Sketch to PowerPoint converter · Sketch App Sources, Jun 2020
- Meet Compiler for Sketch, the sassy plugin to manage your exports · Barrel, Apr 2019
- Time to design presentations right in Sketch and convert them to .ppt or .key · Barrel, Jan 2018
Education & credentials
- Master's in Design, University for the Creative Arts, London, UK · 2023–2024
- BSc in Animation & Visual Effects, Zee Institute of Creative Art (ZICA), Kochi, India · 2013–2016
- Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification · Nielsen Norman Group, 2024
- Adobe Certified Associate — Photoshop · Adobe, 2014
- IBM Generative & Agentic AI Expert – Designer · IBM, 2026
- IBM Garage Essentials · IBM, 2023
- Design & User Experience (D&UX) Essentials · IBM, 2021
- Enterprise Design Thinking – Team Essentials for AI · IBM, 2021
- Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner · IBM, 2021
Skills
Design systems · Design tokens · Component libraries · Design operations (DesignOps) · Product design · Interaction design · Figma · Figma plugin development · Design tooling · AI-native design formats · Design-to-code · Vue / Nuxt · Rust / WebAssembly