Agile Design Systems
with meaningful code and automation
Talk
post type
Accoutrement
OddBird’s Accoutrement tools help keep design tokens meaningful to both humans and machines – opening the door for automation, while improving readability. These tools also integrate with Herman, our automated pattern-library generator.
All your patterns in one place
Copy permalink to “All your patterns in one place”By storing all our design tokens and patterns in Sass maps, we can improve both organization and automation – making our design systems meaningful to both developers and the Sass language.
# npm
npm install accoutrement
# yarn
yarn add accoutrementModules
Utilities
Various Sass utilities to help manage strings, maps, and lists. As more functions are added to the Sass core, we hope to be able to remove some or all of these over time.
Tokens
Custom syntax for managing design tokens and arbitrary patterns in a format that encourages maintenance and automation.
Ratios
Define and access ratios using the Accoutrement token syntax. Several common ratios are provided.
Animate
Manage timing, easing, transitions, and animations – with built-in shortcuts for common patterns.
Color
Manage your color palettes in one place, and access them from anywhere with optional accessibility guidance from the WCAG.
Layout
Layout utilities including named media-queries, breakpoint map management, and organized named z-index layers.
Scale
Manage a system of consistent sizes to use across your project for typography, spacing, layout, and more. Generate sizes based on modular-scale ratios, and access sizes in any unit you need.
Type
Manage your webfonts, import them all with a single command, and access font-stacks on-the-fly, with utilities for generated content and accessibility.
Posts
VueConf US
Agile design systems in Vue
I’ve been excited about Vue.js since Sarah Drasner first showed me the basics. Since then, we’ve started using it for client work at OddBird, and I’m constantly impressed by the power and simplicity – so it was a real honor being invited to speak at the first VueConf US in…
Herman Style Guides
An agile approach to design systems on a budget
Design systems streamline development, communication, and consistency – but often rely on dedicated teams and extended budgets. We wanted a tool to create and maintain living style guides & pattern libraries in an agile process, and on a budget. Herman helps keep our development flow simple, and our UX consistent…
Talk post typeCode Patterns & Style Guides
Living Style Guide documentation on the web is a difficult problem, gaining a lot of attention in the last few years. Let’s take an in-depth look at one way to store patterns directly in Sass, and generate documentation automatically.
Generating Code Documentation for Polyglot Projects
Code documentation is ideally written as close to the actual code as possible, but compiled into a comprehensive set of documentation that includes code from all languages in use. Here’s how we intend to do that.