Sauron · Shreyo Debnath

At a glance

An automated peer reviewer for the details people miss.

Problem

Peer review catches the experience and misses the details: compliance words, off-token colours, spacing that breaks the 4px rhythm. Those surface in dev, in a visual QA pass days later, or they ship.

My part

I built it solo: a Figma plugin that reads the selected frames and checks them against copy, colour and spacing rules, before dev and after.

Result

Eight weeks from a line item with no spec to a published plugin. The check is now one click inside Figma.

Context

Peer review catches the experience. It misses the details.

When a designer reviews another designer's work, they're looking at the flow. The hierarchy. Whether the screen makes sense. They're not stopping to check if every CTA uses the right hex value. They're not reading every word to find the one that says "utilize" instead of "use." They're not measuring every padding value to confirm it's on the 4px rhythm.

This is what slips through. Not the obvious things. The small ones.

A compliance wordIn body copy.

A colour that's closePulled from the wrong token.

A spacing value off the grid10px instead of 8px.

These aren't caught in peer review because peer review isn't designed to catch them. They get caught in dev. Or in a visual QA (VQA) pass that runs days later. Or they ship.

Sauron is the check that happens before any of that.

Solution

Two modes, at two moments in the design process.

A Figma plugin acting as an automated peer reviewer.

Before dev: design hygiene

Copy compliance against prohibited words sheet
US English: flags British spellings and grammar
Colour audit against design system tokens
Spacing rhythm: flags values breaking the 4px grid
Component check: unlinked elements that should be system components

After dev: visual QA

Compares built product against the design file
Copy drift between design and implementation
Spacing and colour deviation
Illustration and asset drift

Process

Eight weeks from a line item to a published plugin.

The design director's AI Product Design Workflow list in March 2026. Two items assigned to me: Visual QA and American Spelling Check. The brief was a line item. No spec, no prior tool, no reference.

I built it solo. The plugin runs directly inside Figma, reads the selected frames, and checks them against the rules. The prohibited words list and compliance terms pull from an external sheet. Colours check against the design system token library. Spacing flags anything not divisible by 4.

Outcome

The launch.

Announced to the team on May 14. Published to the Figma Community on May 19, alongside the Screen Namer plugin. Two tools, same day. Both built solo.

"Very cool. Very contra vibe." Design Director

Before Sauron. Compliance copy issues and colour drift were caught in VQA or not at all. Designers ran their own hygiene checks against a list they had to find and read manually. → After Sauron. The check is one click inside Figma. It runs before the file moves to PD, as the last gate before handoff.