A Living Styleguide made with Jekyll

I decided to roll my own Jekyll-based design system, here’s what happened.

There are a lot of really great styleguide methods, tools and examples out there… but, I struggled to find one that was:

  • easy and quick to use,
  • simple to maintain,
  • a match for my current workflow,
  • flexible enough to use on a wide variety of projects.

Pattern Lab (by Brad Frost & Dave Olsen) is kind of seen as the gold-standard when it comes to documenting styles and patterns that follow some form of the atomic design approach - but I am not a big fan of PHP, and I found it super difficult to customize the interface.

Pattern Lab

This learning-curve, or lack of customize-ability was the case for many a tool I found listed on styleguides.io. While there are a lot of good ones out there, I always found myself looking for something that could be used with my current set-up, for me, that means Jekyll-based.

My Requirements

I decided that the following requirements would meet my needs:

  • Use only Jekyll as a pre-requisit
  • Use HMTL/CSS/JS to build a web component, template, etc. (I called these ‘patterns’)
  • Track the ‘maturity’ of a pattern - i.e. is it ready to use, or not?
  • Automatically add all patterns into a ‘Roadmap’
  • Simple documentation for developers, designers product owners to use
  • Build a style guide container or shell that is unobtrusive and easy to visually customize

The System

Jekyll Style Guide

  1. Setup and installation info
  2. Read the design principles
  3. Learn how to add patterns, and documentation

Get the Code

Jekyll Style Guide

Click here to go to the tool, all code is free for you to reuse.

Jekyll Style Guide Homepage

JekyllStyleGuide.com

The Roadmap

Roadmap

Maturity Scale

Maturity Scale

Pattern Example

Pattern Example

I would love to know what other people think about style guide tools, what works for you? Drop me a comment below.