Drupal 11 + Figma + AI: Auto-Building Pages from Design Mockups

Design-to-code has always been a tedious part of web development—until now. With Drupal 11, AI integrations and smarter tooling are closing the gap between design mockups (like those from Figma) and real, functional Drupal pages.

In this post, we’ll explore how AI, Figma, and Drupal 11 work together to auto-generate layouts, content, and even component logic—giving developers and designers a faster, smarter workflow.

🧩 Why This Matters

Traditionally:

• Designers create wireframes in Figma

• Developers manually rebuild them in HTML/CSS/Drupal templates

• Hours are spent converting visuals into layout regions, blocks, and fields

Now, with AI-powered layout interpreters and Drupal's flexible architecture, we can:

✅ Analyze Figma files
✅ Extract design tokens and layout structure
✅ Automatically create Paragraphs, Layout Builder blocks, or custom templates in Drupal
✅ Even fill in content placeholders with AI-generated text

🔧 How It Works (High-Level Flow)

1. Figma → JSON Export
   Figma lets you export the design structure as a JSON object (via plugins or Figma API).

2. AI Parser → Component Detection
   Use OpenAI (GPT-4), Claude, or Hugging Face models to interpret this JSON into logical layout regions.

3. Drupal Layout Generator
   A custom module/script processes the AI output and:

   • Creates Layout Builder sections

   • Adds Paragraphs

   • Maps content types or views

⚙️ Step-by-Step Setup

Step 1: Export Figma Design

Use a plugin like Figma to JSON, or Figma’s REST API:                                                                                                 

This will give you a JSON structure with:

• Frames

• Components

• Hierarchy

• Text values

• Image URLs

Step 2: Use AI to Convert to Drupal Blocks

Feed the JSON to a language model like OpenAI

$client = \Drupal::httpClient();
$response = $client->post('https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions', [
  'headers' => [
    'Authorization' => 'Bearer YOUR_OPENAI_KEY',
    'Content-Type' => 'application/json',
  ],
  'json' => [
    'model' => 'gpt-4',
    'messages' => [
      [
        'role' => 'user',
        'content' => "Convert this Figma JSON layout into a Drupal Layout Builder definition with blocks: " . $figma_json
      ]
    ],
  ]
]);
$data = json_decode($response->getBody(), true);
$layout_output = $data['choices'][0]['message']['content'];

Step 3: Create Layout in Drupal

If you use Layout Builder, you can programmatically add sections like this

$entity = \Drupal::entityTypeManager()->getStorage('node')->create([
  'type' => 'page',
  'title' => 'AI Generated Page',
]);
$entity->layout_builder__layout = [
  'layout_id' => 'layout_onecol',
  'section_storage' => 'overrides',
];
$entity->save();

🤖 AI Suggestions for Content & SEO

Once the layout is generated, you can even use AI to fill in placeholder content

$response = \Drupal::service('openai.api')->chat("Generate a welcome headline for a startup homepage");
$headline = $response['message'] ?? 'Welcome to our website!';

This works well for:

• Headers

• Hero descriptions

• Button texts

• Meta descriptions (for SEO)

📦 Bonus: Modules You Can Use

✅ Final Thoughts

Drupal 11 isn’t just a backend CMS anymore—it’s becoming a bridge between design, content, and AI automation. With tools like OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Figma’s API, developers can now skip hours of repetitive layout work and focus on building smarter, design-consistent websites faster than ever.

The dream of “Figma to Drupal with one click” is closer than you think