🎨 How to style your design system in 2021 (#39)
Happy Tuesday!
Welcome to all of the new subscribers this week! I'm glad you're here. And to all of the subscribers who've been around for awhile, thanks for sticking around!
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It feels like there are an endless number of tools to help you style your design system in 2021:
It can feel impossible to get started when there are so many options to choose from.
Luckily for the rest of us, the Polaris team had an open discussion about the very topic, resulting in this awesome thread: https://github.com/Shopify/polaris/discussions/44.
They also include a link to a more detailed view of the research if you'd like to dig in deeper.
Polaris chose vanilla-extract, a new library from the engineers at Seek. (By the way, if you haven't checked out Seek's design system Braid, you definitely should).
Some of the benefits of vanilla-extract include:
- TypeScript integration
- No runtime overhead
- An opinionated approach
- It's framework agnostic
I've found that the way vanilla-extract works is almost identical to the way that I tend to approach design tokens, so I'm really excited to continue to use the library.
Have you used vanilla-extract, or any of these other libraries? What did you think? Let me know by replying to this email.
Talk soon,
Mae