The Carbon team is committed to maintaining consistent, quality guidelines. We welcome all feedback, designs, or ideas in order to produce the best possible experience for our users.
If you're interested in contributing please follow the guidelines below.
If you have any questions, reach out to us at carbon@us.ibm.com.
The easiest way for us to get an understanding of your needs is to open an issue. Follow our issue template (you'll see this when you go to open an issue) to ensure you are meeting the issue writing requirements. Screenshots are required when submitting a new pattern or component. A member of the Carbon team will respond to your issue with next steps or a follow up.
Not sure where to open an issue?
The carbon-design-kit repo is for Sketch and Craft bugs, as well as feedback on the Design Kit and component design.
The design-system-website repo is for Carbon website specific feedback or bugs.
Not sure how to submit an issue?
It's not so bad, we promise! You can read a tutorial on GitHub to get familiar with best practices.
The easiest way to move forward in the design process is to set up an in-person or remote call with the Carbon team to go over your design work. We'll provide you with feedback on your proposal and what, if any, changes are needed before bringing them into Carbon.
What does it take for your design to pass Carbon's design review?
The Carbon team will look for a few major things:
- Is your design WCAG AA accessible?
- Does your design pass color contrast ratio?
- Have you considered keyboard tabbing and focus states?
Most components we accept into the global library need to work universally across products.
- Have you tested this design for multiple use cases? It needs to be a pattern that all teams can utilize, and global enough to fit use cases for other teams.
- Is there a similiar component in the library that already exists?
- What are the advantages of this pattern over alternative patterns?
- Is your design consistent with our default visual style we have established for the core Carbon library?
- Do your interaction patterns (hover, focus, motion, animations) match existing Carbon styles?
- Does your design follow basic UX best practices?
- Does your design promote clear language, correct grammar, and support globalization?
Please make sure you have run through these design guidelines prior to the initial design review meeting. The Carbon team will be looking for the points mentioned above.
We'll work with your team to determine when your design will be implemented into Carbon, and the logistics behind it. Development resources are greatly appreciated and welcomed. If your pattern is submitted without any code, please keep in mind it may be delayed from getting released into the Carbon component library until we can fit it into our team sprint schedule.