We’ve been thinking a lot about how AI could actually help Zeplin users — with features that make real sense. Some of the tools we’re using added AI features, just for the buzz, and a lot of it felt off. And we wanted to avoid that. We didn't want to build yet another AI feature just for the sake of it, it had to be useful for Zepliners.
One of the best parts of building Zeplin is that we get to use it every day.
All of our designers and developers actively work in Zeplin, so we figured that this was a great chance to challenge ourselves: What would we actually find helpful?
This where the hackathon comes in.
We dedicated a full week to an internal hackathon, with one goal: build AI-powered features, improvements, or workflows for Zeplin. Whether that meant automating existing processes or introducing something entirely new, the mission was the same — push boundaries and explore what’s possible. 🤓
Even though it was fully remote, the crew still had a lot of fun! So now, we’re excited to share some of the ideas we explored and the ones we’re already turning into real features.
Running a remote hackathon
We’re a remote crew but we didn’t want people to go dark and silent while they were heads-down hacking.
So, how were we going to keep everyone engaged?
That question got us thinking... and sparked an idea: what if we assigned side quests?
It totally changed the vibe of the week.
Each day, teams had two side tasks:
Group photo + daily song: every team had to share one group photo and a song that represented their mood for the day.
Mystery side quests: these were surprise tasks, automatically sent to a dedicated Slack channel each morning. No one knew what was coming until it dropped.
The side quests got out of hand, *cough* in the best way.
We went with a mysterious fantasy theme when sending out quests. I even kicked off the week in full character—not as myself, but more like Elrond summoning the Fellowship to destroy the Ring.
And apparently, the theme awakened the inner magicians in every Zepliner. People started creating their own characters, writing stories, even staging battles.
For the evaluation, we had 5 criteria in mind with 5 jury members.
To evaluate each project fairly, we used five key criteria:
- Pitch & presentation: How clearly the idea is communicated
- Impact: The potential value it brings to Zeplin users
- Execution: How well the idea was built within the given time
- Creativity & innovation: How unique the solution is
- Collaboration: How equally team members contributed throughout the process
We had 4 jury members, and the 5th vote was from everyone in the crew.
And voilà — here are the top 3 projects!
🥉 3rd place: The Magical Code Potion (a.k.a MCP)
Berk flew solo on this one and actually took the top spot in the crew vote! He built an MCP Server for Zeplin and delivered an impressive live demo (thanks to demo gods) where AI rebuilt a screen straight from Zeplin, reading even the annotations on it.
Oh, and by the way, after some great improvements, we’ve already released it! You can learn more about Zeplin’s MCP Server here.
🥈 2nd place: The Magic Wand
The Magic Wand helps users give simple instructions for the actions they want to take and then automates them.✨
The magicians behind it? Ali, Gülnaz, and Salih Berk.
Want to organize a bunch of 3-month-old screens under an Archived named section? Just use the Magic Wand. Need to automatically tag a group of same-themed screens? Yep, just use the Magic Wand.
🥇1st place: The Judge Bot
Despite the name, it’s not really here to judge — just help. Or judge. You never know. It did seem a little suspicious. 👀
Three brave souls, Berkay, Melisa, and Merih set out to help designers get AI-powered design reviews. Now, AI can flag issues with your design system, accessibility, or even simple things like typos.
Oh, and yes, Judge Bot had a personality. A strong one.
They got the cutest little robot as their first-place prize. We hope it makes great company as they build!
Evaluating was hard — there were so many great ideas.
Some of our favorites included:
- Auto-organizing screens and components in Zeplin
- Helping designers document their designs
- Giving workspaces detailed usage insights
- Generating boilerplate code snippets from Styleguide components
...and more. So yeah, it wasn’t easy picking just three.
We’re building some of these as we speak.
We’ve already released Zeplin’s MCP Server — but we also kicked off two more projects inspired by the hackathon:
- AI self-review for designs
- Auto-organizing screens using sections, subsections, and screen variants
What do you think?
If you think we can do better or have ideas to share, we’re all ears. It’s an exciting time to build, and we love chatting with fellow designers and developers. Ping us on Discord.
Cheers,
Your friends at Zeplin
