Unlocking the frontend – a call for standardizing component APIs pt.2
#tldr Why Design Systems, and a more structured approach to frontend engineering in general, might be key to a more shared frontend ecosystem. And how this thought might hit an interesting inflection point rather sooner than later, with the advent of production-ready Web Components as a shared technical standard and foundation for interoperability.
So what are the missing pieces? And how could our latest release, and the accompanying schema tooling open sourced with it, play into this? And what would a blog post be today, without tying it into AI? Buckle in: this will be a long one!
Why Design Systems are the missing piece in MACH architectures
In the digital world, architectures make or break the business. The choice of architecture is the cornerstone upon which a business’s digital strategies are built, influencing time-to-market, operational efficiency, and overall customer excellence. Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless (MACH) architectures have been gaining ground, disrupting the market with their modular and flexible approach that enables developers to construct, scale and evolve digital commerce platforms more effectively.
Yet, amidst all the capabilities of MACH architectures, businesses often overlook a key piece of an efficient digital landscape – a Digital Design System. This crucial component of the system not only provides a unified user interface but also ensures that all parts of the MACH architecture deliver an aligned and unified customer experience.
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In this post Daniel explains why kickstartDS is a meta framework for Design System creation and how you can benefit from it when starting to develop a Design System
#tldr We’ve added extensive documentation around the creation of Design Systems with kickstartDS. From general intro and foundation articles and component example guides to our main guide “Create your Design System”… explaining every single step of the process in detail. And for everyone wanting to dive in head first, we’ve added an extensive, best-practice Starter as a Github template! Clone it and kickstart your Design System in just 5 minutes!
#tldr: Container Queries are another new feature coming with the Open Source release of kickstartDS. It’s a proposed feature for CSS that allows the styling of elements to be based on the size of the container in which they are placed, rather than the size of whole browser frame. This is important for Design Systems because it allows for more flexibility and modularity in the design of components.
#tldr: Design Token are all the rage these days. In almost every channel from the Design System space, you can feel a crispy white noise around the broad topic of Design Token. We also put in a lot of effort when refactoring our Token structure in kickstartDS for our latest release. It might look over-engineered on a first glimpse, but we understand ourselves as a meta framework for Design System creation and therefore want to provide you best practice defaults.
kickstartDS is Open Source now. Let’s start to democratize Design Systems today
Finally, the wait is over … today we are very proud to announce the Open Source release of kickstartDS. It’s been roughly one year since we started to go to market as we published our website, and we are thrilled to share the kickstartDS core with everyone from the Design System community.
How our initiative workshop series helps customers to decide for or against building a design system
this post explains and presents the Design System Initiative. Read the what, the why and for whom it might be the best way to kickstart a design system.
Quarterly Design System and Frontend Podcast Roundup – Q1/22
Read our roundup of podcasts released in the first quarter of 2022. Everything related to Design Systems, Frontend development and headless CMS / Jamstack
Setting up a working Design System in less than a day
In this post we demonstrate how kicking off a Design System, by applying tokens and adding some customization, can be done in under a day. In the process recreating the Sanity.io landing page, with its style and content, as a fully functional prototype based on the resulting components.
Unlocking the frontend – a call for standardizing component APIs pt.1
We’re still wasting massive amounts of valuable development cycles in the frontend world by working in silos, or by to at least some extent reinventing the wheel for every project. Results suffer in the process, impacting real world results for users and content creators alike.
How did we get here, and how could a way forward look like? How we’ve already come a long way, and why still (so far) even Jamstack hasn’t been the sole answer, either…
