Greetings, fellow technology enthusiasts and programming prodigies! Today, we embark on a journey to unlock the secrets of the coveted components library.
As developers, we often find ourselves reinventing the wheel with every new project. But what if we could streamline our workflow and eliminate the need to start from scratch each time? Enter the components library - a collection of reusable UI elements that can be easily imported into any project.
But fear not, for we will not settle for any ordinary components library. No, we will delve deep into the realm of sleek design and optimal functionality, crafting a library that would make even the most seasoned developers envious.
So grab your favorite coding beverage and prepare to expand your skill set, for we are about to embark on a journey of epic proportions. The journey to create the ultimate components library begins now.
This series of articles will explore the process of creating a custom library of React components. We'll cover the following topics:
- An introduction to layouts in Figma, which includes pre-made components and color palettes
- Deciding on the overall design and which technologies to use
- Implementation
Introduction in figma layout
I'm not an expert in design, so please don't judge this layout too harshly. I created it as a starting point for our project, with the main goal of creating a minimum viable product. By minimum viable product, I mean a set of components that can be used to assemble a blog.
So, what do we have here? There are several components that, in my opinion, are essential for creating a simple blog design:
- Buttons: what design doesn't need buttons?
- Typography: it's fairly simple to implement, and it will be sufficient for our needs
- Tags: a common element in blogs
- Colors (with CSS variable names included): an important feature, as the color design tokens will be used to build the entire theme.
Decision about technology stack
To make decisions about the stack, we need to understand what we want to achieve in the end. I've identified several criteria and possible solutions:
- I want the library to be a monorepo with components delivered as separate packages, similar to how it's done in React Spectrum by Adobe. We've decided to use a monorepo on NPM workspaces.
- I want the components to be keyboard accessible and properly readable by screen readers. To avoid having to build this functionality ourselves, we can use existing solutions like Headless UI or React Aria, and simply choose which one to use.
- We will use webpack as our build tool, simply because I have experience with its configuration and it's quite flexible.
Conclusion
So, we've summarized the first part of the articles, and in the future, I'll be publishing further steps on creating our own component library. This promises to be quite interesting, so stay tuned! :)