Design System 🐥

A small, opinionated CSS framework to make sites look good with minimal effort

• 🔥 Embraces semantic HTML to make native elements look great out of the box, without classes
• 😎 Small set of utilities for additional states and convenience
• 🐛 Tiny (<6kb min+gzip) footprint with no runtime dependencies or build step required
• 🌈 Automatic color system that reduces time spent fiddling with color palettes
• 🪗 Fully responsive

Installation

From a CDN:

@import url("https://esm.sh/gh/andreasphil/design-system@<tag>/dist/design-system.min.css")
layer(theme);

import { useThemeColor } from "https://esm.sh/gh/andreasphil/design-system@<tag>";

With a package manager:

npm install github:andreasphil/design-system#<tag>

Usage

Find the demo at https://andreasphil.github.io/design-system/.

First, import the CSS. I recommend using layers to avoid conflicts and specificity chaos when customizing.

@import "@andreasphil/design-system/style.css" layer(theme);

@layer theme {
  /* You can add customizations and override variables here. */
}

The CSS loosely follows CUBE CSS:

• Global, high-level styles: nost styling is global styling of plain HTML elements. There are a bunch of design tokens for colors, fonts, shared spacing, etc. in src/base/variables.css that you can use to customize the Design System or apply to your own components.

• Blocks: The framework includes opinionated styling for almost all common HTML elements inside src/blocks/.

• Exceptions: Some blocks, such as buttons, come with variants (also called exceptions). According to CUBE CSS, variants are applied using data- attributes.

• Composition & utilites: With the exception of a few utilities, these are outside the scope of the framework.

Automatic theme color

There is a helper that will manage the theme color for light and dark mode automatically:

import { useThemeColor } from "@andreasphil/design-system";

const { unsubscribe } = useThemeColor();

// Call if you want to stop automatic theme color management
unsubscribe();

Development

Design System is built with Lightning CSS. Packages are managed by npm. The following commands are available:

node --run dev          # Compile stylesheets in watch mode
node --run build        # Bundle for production

For a demo, open index.html in a browser.

Deployment

Deployment should work out of the box on GitHub Pages.

Credits

This library uses a number of open source packages listed in package.json. Icons are from Lucide. It was inspired by Pico.css.

Thanks 🙏