Open Tools for Developers

Design systems streamline development, communication, and consistency – but often rely on dedicated teams and extended budgets. We wanted a tool that helps create and maintain living style guides & pattern libraries in an agile process, and on a budget. Herman helps you keep your development process simple – and your UX consistent – as you iterate on patterns and scale over time.

Start using Herman or hire us for design systems training.

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of Web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel.

Susy is a lightweight grid-layout engine for Sass, designed to simplify and clarify responsive grid layouts without ever getting in your way. You can use Susy with floats, flexbox, tables, or any other CSS technique. You’re the expert, we’re just here to make your job easier.

True is a full-featured unit-testing library for Sass. The core functionality is written in pure SassScript, so it can be used anywhere Sass is compiled. Advanced features are available with our test-runner integration and Mocha.

Plone is a mature content management platform written in Python and developed by an international open source community. It has particular strengths in user experience for content editors, flexible theming, and customizability by developers.

OddBird’s Accoutrement tools (now merged into a single npm package) are designed around the idea that design systems should be meaningful to both humans and machines – opening the door for automation, while improving readability. These tools integrate with Herman, our automated pattern-library generator.

A powerful markup templating language with block inheritance, autoescaping, macros, asynchronous control, and more. Heavily inspired by Jinja2, Nunjucks is fast, lean, highly performant, and extensible.

A tool for creating isolated ‘virtual’ python environments.

The PyPA recommended tool for installing Python packages.

An open source CSS authoring framework which uses the Sass language to make writing and sharing stylesheets powerful and easy. Compass was the first package-manager and toolkit-sharing platform for CSS, helping popularize the Sass language – and offering powerful browser-compatability tools that changed the landscape for designers developers.