My Design System

Why I Created a Design System

I was using Material UI for a project, and the bundle size, combined with the css-in-js approach to styling, resulted in an application that was difficult to render on the server and that had a pretty poor initial load time. I wanted to create a design system that was similar to Material UI / Flutter but that emphasized semantic HTML and a small bundle size.

Also, when creating a Rich Text Editor with Lexical, I found that it was best to not use highly abstracted components, so I tried to create a library of simple components that can be easily rendered on the server and that doesn't use too much CSS and JavaScript.

In summary, the goal of the design system is to create a look that is comparable to other popular design libraries used today while minimizing load time, bundle size, and complexity.

Assumptions

NOTE: This design system uses CSS and JavaScript that are tied together - i.e., some classes are required for components' JavaScript to work correctly. The design system bundles and transpiles client-side JavaScript using webpack, which is why you might want to download the JavaScript and CSS files from the resources section and tweak them / re-transpile them for your own use. If you make changes to the CSS, I recommend you use PostCSS so your changes will appear the same across all browsers.

The design system assumes that:

you want to use HTMX to create a SPA (Single Page Application),
you want to use semantic html, but that you want to style components primarily with CSS classes and inline styling,
your Content Security Policy allows for inline styling,
you want to use Floating UI for tooltips, menus, dropdowns, and the like,
you want to have slightly different layouts for desktop and mobile,
you want to prioritize mobile devices (you want the application that you show the user to always be similar to the mobile device view),
you do not want to listen to resize events on mobile

Explore the Design System

If you are looking for information about specific components or utility classes, use the links in the list below to find more information about those aspects of the system. Each aspect of the design system should describe the styling, accessability, and JavaScript concerns that go along with it.

If you are looking to learn more about the design system and the decisions made, continue reading below or navigate to the 'General' page for the design system.

If you want the code, navigate to the resources section.

Note that I am still working on documenting the design system. I got tired of writing the documentation and wanted to move onto other things. I will come back and finish / improve the documentation eventually.

Components and Utility Classes

NOTE: Popovers includes tooltips, dropdowns, dialogs, and menus - basically everything that is shown on mouseover or focus or everything that is in the top-layer. Media includes images, video, and audio. Surfaces includes cards, quotes, and asides. Other Inputs includes toggle buttons. Tabs includes tabs, steppers, and mobile steppers. Fixed Content includes the navbar, footer, sidebars, drawers, and Floating Action Buttons.

Code

About Code

I use highlight.js to generate markup to display code in HTML form. Press CTRL+Q, press the button below, or press the "Code" button on the navigation sidebar to generate code markup.

All languages that can be highlighted with highlight.js can be used on this site as well. You can generate code markup in either an inline or block style. If you generate the block style, then the code markup will come with a button that, when clicked, will copy the code if the code markup to the clipboard of the user.
Reference hightlight.js for code, and github for styling.

Code Examples:

Block Code

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
  printf("Hello World!");
  return 0;
}

Inline Code

I am going to explain why the <body> tag should have its style set to: style="overflow-y:hidden" when a dialog is open.

Search Icons

About Icon Search

Resources

Click on the individual buttons to download separate files, or click on the All Files button to download a ZIP file of all the code. The code is sent pre-transpiled for readability.
Click on the VSCode Snippet button to download a copy of the html.json file that will make implementing this design system simpler.

All Files

Shared CSS

Desktop CSS Mobile CSS

Shared JavaScript

Desktop JavaScript Mobile JavaScript

VSCode Snippet