December 10, 2019

285 words 2 mins read

Building a style guide with efficiency, accessibility, and performance built in

Building a style guide with efficiency, accessibility, and performance built in

Creating a lasting style guide that the product team will actually use and adopt is challenging. Archana Sankaranarayanan demonstrates how to build a style guide instantly with an Atomic CSS-based starter that ensures accessibility, performance, and engineering and design efficiency and shares some PostCSS tools to help grow the style guide, maintain it, and ease its adoption.

Talk Title Building a style guide with efficiency, accessibility, and performance built in
Speakers Archana Sankaranaray (Netflix)
Conference O’Reilly Fluent Conference
Conf Tag The Web Platform in Practice
Location San Jose, California
Date June 20-22, 2017
URL Talk Page
Slides Talk Slides
Video

Archana Sankaranarayanan demonstrates how to build a style guide instantly with an Atomic CSS-based starter that ensures accessibility, performance, and engineering and design efficiency and shares some PostCSS tools to help grow the style guide, maintain it, and ease its adoption among engineers and designers. Common problems with CSS today include redundancy, color collisions, visual inconsistency, high specificity, tech stack-specific issues, and large bloats with bootstrap-like CSS frameworks, but style guides can help. Archana walks you through setting up a style guide by first installing a style guide starter that offers structure and samples for common UI elements, comprised of: These elements have best practices baked in. Archana takes a deeper look at what makes them accessible and performant and explains how to edit the elements to reflect your brand. Archana then discusses how to sustain your style guide so it grows with the product, withstands engineer and designer churn, and keeps the product shiny and consistent and shares available tools in PostCSS like color collision detection, linting colors, and linting type, font weights, and line heights, as well as some tools to measure CSS.

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