design-system

FAQ

Generic

What is a design system?

A “Design System” is a collection of reusable components and tools, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build digital products and experiences. Design systems solve the easy problems, so that products can solve hard problems more easily.

What is the goal of a design system?

The goal of a design system is to improve user interface consistency and quality, while making software design and development processes more efficient. A design system also helps to establish a common vocabulary between everyone in the organization and ease collabo­ration between different teams and disciplines. See our goals for more.

Why is the design system public?

Public documentation makes sharing and collaboration between different teams and third party vendors much easier as it increases the system’s visibility and accountability. This also makes us push towards higher quality content and enables us to be more transparent. Finally, this also serves as an amazing tool that we can leverage in recruiting.

What’s on the roadmap?

See our Roadmap page for up to date plans.

Who works on Kesko Design System?

Kesko Design System is built and supported by a core team of designers and developers who work at Kesko. The team is currently being lead by Ariel Salminen.

Usage

Should we use the Kesko Design System?

First of all, please note that it is still early days and we haven’t published any modules for usage just yet. Nevertheless, the short answer to the question is yes, you should use it as soon as possible. Kesko Design System improves UI consistency and quality, while making our software design and development processes more efficient.

What if the design system doesn’t fill our team’s requirements?

Our contribution model will allow product teams to add new features based on their product requirements. At the same time, it will allow us to keep an eye on the quality and consistency of the user experience.

What’s the meaning of “draft” badges?

These badges indicate whether something is ready to be used in production. Draft status means that it’s still under work and should be used with caution in production environments.

Can I use these tools in any project?

Kesko Design System is meant for building digital products and experiences for Kesko Oyj. Our terms of use don’t allow usage outside of this context.

Are the tools open source?

No, but feel free to browse our documentation to learn how we approach design and development at Kesko.

How do I get started?

See the Getting started section in the documentation.

Technical

What browsers are supported?

Kesko Design System is tested in the latest two versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox and Opera. Our team addresses critical bug fixes in earlier versions based on their severity and impact. If you need to support IE11 or pre-Chromium Edge, this library isn’t for you.

Can I use Kesko Design System with other frameworks?

Yes. All selectors and similar are prefixed with k- to prevent collisions.

How are the components built?

Components are written in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. They ship as standards based Custom Elements making them compatible with current and future JavaScript based frameworks like React, Vue or Angular.

How do you version the design system?

We follow “Semantic Versioning.” Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying features and what has been modified from one version to the next. For more details, please see the documentation.