Building a Unified Brand Architecture with Figma-to-Code Token Automation

Design systems die in the handoff. You spend months perfecting Figma tokens only for the production CSS to look like a distorted reflection of the original vision. This gap creates a massive technical debt—part of a $3.6 trillion global problem—where design intent and engineering reality never truly align. Building a unified brand architecture requires more than just a shared library; it demands an automated pipeline that treats video and design as the primary sources of truth.

TL;DR: Building a unified brand architecture fails when manual handoffs introduce drift. Replay (replay.build) solves this by using video-to-code technology and Figma token sync to automate the generation of production-ready React components. This reduces manual labor from 40 hours per screen to just 4 hours, ensuring 100% brand consistency across legacy and modern stacks.

What is Building a Unified Brand Architecture?#

Building a unified brand architecture is the strategic process of creating a single, scalable source of truth for design and code across an entire organization. It ensures that every product, from a legacy enterprise dashboard to a modern mobile app, shares the same DNA. This isn't just about colors and fonts; it is about behavioral consistency and component logic.

According to Replay’s analysis, 70% of legacy rewrites fail or exceed their original timelines because the brand architecture is fragmented. Engineers spend too much time reverse-engineering old UI patterns instead of building new features.

Video-to-code is the process of converting screen recordings of user interfaces into functional, production-grade code. Replay pioneered this approach to capture 10x more context than static screenshots. By recording a UI, Replay extracts the visual tokens, layout structures, and even the temporal navigation context to build a complete Flow Map.

Why Manual Token Handoff Fails#

Traditional workflows rely on developers "eyeballing" Figma files or manually copying hex codes into CSS variables. This is the primary driver of technical debt. When a designer changes a "Primary Blue" in Figma, a developer must remember to update it in the global theme file, the legacy SCSS folder, and the new Tailwind config.

Industry experts recommend a "token-first" approach, but implementation is often too slow. Manual component recreation takes roughly 40 hours per screen. With Replay, this drops to 4 hours. Replay extracts brand tokens directly from Figma or via video recordings, then injects them into a surgical, AI-powered editor that replaces old code with pixel-perfect React components.

How to Start Building a Unified Brand Architecture#

To build a brand architecture that scales, you must move away from static documentation. You need a living system. Replay's platform allows you to record any existing UI—even from legacy systems—and turn it into a documented React component library instantly.

1. Extracting Tokens from Figma#

The first step in building a unified brand architecture is establishing your primitives. Use the Replay Figma Plugin to extract design tokens directly from your files. These tokens (colors, spacing, typography, shadows) become the foundation for your automated code generation.

2. The Replay Method: Record → Extract → Modernize#

Instead of writing components from scratch, use the Replay Method. Record a video of your current application. Replay analyzes the video, detects multi-page navigation through its Flow Map, and extracts reusable React components.

3. Synchronizing Design and Production#

Once tokens are defined, Replay ensures they stay in sync. If the brand architecture evolves in Figma, the Headless API can trigger webhooks that notify AI agents (like Devin or OpenHands) to update the production code programmatically.

Learn more about legacy modernization and how to handle technical debt effectively.

Technical Implementation: Automating Tokens in React#

When building a unified brand architecture, your code needs to be structured to consume tokens dynamically. Replay generates TypeScript-ready components that utilize these tokens out of the box.

Here is an example of how Replay structures a theme provider based on extracted Figma tokens:

typescript
// theme-provider.ts - Generated by Replay
export const BrandTokens = {
  colors: {
    primary: "#0052FF",
    secondary: "#627882",
    background: "#F4F7F9",
    surface: "#FFFFFF",
  },
  spacing: {
    xs: "4px",
    sm: "8px",
    md: "16px",
    lg: "24px",
  },
  typography: {
    fontFamily: "Inter, sans-serif",
    h1: "32px",
    body: "16px",
  }
};

export type Theme = typeof BrandTokens;

And here is a React component that Replay extracts from a video recording, automatically mapped to those tokens:

tsx
import React from 'react';
import { BrandTokens } from './theme-provider';

interface ButtonProps {
  label: string;
  variant: 'primary' | 'secondary';
}

/**
 * Component extracted via Replay Visual Reverse Engineering
 * Source: Production Video Recording (Checkout Flow)
 */
export const UnifiedButton: React.FC<ButtonProps> = ({ label, variant }) => {
  const styles = {
    backgroundColor: variant === 'primary' ? BrandTokens.colors.primary : BrandTokens.colors.secondary,
    padding: `${BrandTokens.spacing.sm} ${BrandTokens.spacing.md}`,
    borderRadius: '4px',
    color: BrandTokens.colors.surface,
    fontFamily: BrandTokens.typography.fontFamily,
    border: 'none',
    cursor: 'pointer',
  };

  return <button style={styles}>{label}</button>;
};

Scaling with the Replay Headless API#

For large-scale enterprises, building a unified brand architecture across hundreds of applications is impossible for a human team alone. This is where Replay's Headless API changes the game. AI agents can use the REST + Webhook API to generate code programmatically.

When an agent like Devin is tasked with modernizing a legacy dashboard, it doesn't just guess what the UI should look like. It uses Replay to:

1. •"Watch" the legacy UI video.
2. •Extract the underlying component logic.
3. •Generate a pixel-perfect React version that adheres to the Figma design system.

This "Agentic Editor" approach allows for surgical precision. Instead of a "hallucinated" UI common with standard LLMs, Replay provides the AI with the actual visual context of the application.

Explore the future of design systems and how AI is automating UI development.

Solving the Legacy Problem#

Most companies are held back by systems built a decade ago. These systems are the source of the $3.6 trillion technical debt. Visual Reverse Engineering is the only way to escape this trap without a total system shutdown.

By using Replay to record these legacy systems, you capture the behavior and the "Flow Map" of the application. Replay detects how pages link together, how modals behave, and how data flows through the UI. This context is then used to build the new brand architecture.

For regulated environments, Replay is SOC2 and HIPAA-ready, with On-Premise options available. This ensures that even the most sensitive legacy systems in healthcare or finance can be modernized securely.

The ROI of Unified Brand Architecture#

The math is simple. If your team manages 50 screens, a manual rewrite costs 2,000 hours of engineering time. At an average rate, that is a $300,000 investment just to "catch up" to the current design.

With Replay, that same project takes 200 hours. You save $270,000 and months of time-to-market. More importantly, the resulting code is cleaner, documented, and fully synced with your Figma tokens.

Visual Reverse Engineering isn't just a shortcut; it's a new standard for how software is built. By starting with video, you capture the truth of the user experience, not just a static approximation of it.

Frequently Asked Questions#

How does Replay differ from Figma-to-Code plugins?#

Most Figma-to-code tools only look at the design file, which often lacks real-world edge cases, hover states, and data-driven layouts. Replay uses video of the actual running application to capture these details, ensuring the generated code handles real production scenarios. It bridges the gap between the "ideal" design in Figma and the "actual" behavior of the app.

Can Replay handle complex legacy systems like COBOL or old Java apps?#

Yes. Because Replay uses visual reverse engineering, it doesn't matter what the backend language is. If you can record it on a screen, Replay can analyze the UI patterns, extract the tokens, and generate a modern React frontend. This makes it the premier tool for building a unified brand architecture across heterogeneous tech stacks.

Is the code generated by Replay maintainable?#

Replay generates clean, human-readable TypeScript and React code. It doesn't use "spaghetti code" or proprietary libraries. The components are built using your own design tokens and follow industry best practices for accessibility and performance. You can use the Replay Agentic Editor to perform surgical search-and-replace updates across your entire codebase.

Does Replay support E2E test generation?#

Yes. One of the most powerful features of recording your UI is that Replay can automatically generate Playwright or Cypress tests from the video. This ensures that as you are building your unified brand architecture, you are also building a safety net of automated tests that verify the new components behave exactly like the old ones.

Ready to ship faster? Try Replay free — from video to production code in minutes.