I recently did a chunk of work on the Pulsar design system to improve how we align form elements against a common 12 column grid, and all sorts of fun little things crept out of the woodwork that we’re still tweaking.Normally, when you’re styling up your forms you’d add padding…

Your computer can (probably) see better than you — In part 1 I explained how we use unit tests to validate that the markup generated by our design system components matches our expectations from one release to the next. In this part, I’ll show how we check the visual presentation of those same components. We start again, with a button.

Avoiding the unforseen consequences of change — We have lots of components in our Pulsar design system, but for this post I’m going to focus on just one. The button.

“Don’t break the build.” The mantra you’ll hear often if you work with a continuously integrated product. Design systems, frameworks, pattern libraries or whatever we’re calling them this week usually live outside of the product(s) in which they’re used. They’re products in and of themselves, with their own team, their…

Pulsar is the open-source design system powering the user experience of the Jadu Continuum platform. Sounds fancy, but what does it really mean? Jadu software is used in large organisations, it powers hundreds of local government/council sites as well as some in central government, higher education and commercial sectors. …

It happens every year, almost always at the same time. Autumn kicks in, the weather starts getting cooler, and my mood swings upwards so much that I never fail to notice how much happier I’ve suddenly become and start commenting on how Autumn is my favourite time of year. It’s…

Let me tell you something, pendejo, by the time you’re reading this Pulsar version 3.0.0 should’ve been tagged and released and it was very cathartic. After using Pulsar in anger on the MoJ and Q projects for the best part of two years we learnt a hell of a lot…