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.

Release Spotlight: Container Queries

Release Spotlight: Container Queries

#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.

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.

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.