Carbon’s new information architecture

We’ve made it easier to find the things you need to design and build products efficiently and at speed.

The Carbon design system has been maturing and strengthening its guidance since it first launched into the open source world four years ago. But it had become clear to us that our users needed more direction on how to build things with Carbon.

We wanted to move beyond a library of assets to a design system that is easy for newcomers to Carbon to get up and running, while also helping return users with day-to-day designing and developing activities. To do this, we needed to create space for new things. So we took a step back and reassessed the site information architecture.

New information architecture

To better support the experience of how to use Carbon, we divided the site into two main areas:

• Activities — When you want to learn how to do something, go to the top part of the left navigation. Here you’ll find design and implementation activities including get started pages with kits, frameworks, and tutorials. Details about meetups with the Carbon team and the latest Carbon news can be found here too.
• Assets — When you’re looking to use Carbon assets, our library of resources (guidelines, components, and patterns) is now grouped in the lower part of the left navigation.

New sections for Designer and Developer resources

We’ve created two new hubs for designers and developers so you can find everything in one place.

• Designing includes design kits, theme libraries, color, grid, and icons. And coming soon we’ll have some updated Design Essential tutorials.
• Developing includes everything for devs including frameworks, links to repos and storybooks, and the Developer Essential tutorials.

What’s happening

Find out what we have planned in our new What’s happening section. Check out our published roadmap, and keep track of what we’ve done in the past with our changelog.

This section also includes Meetups — these are online meetings where you can meet with the Carbon team to dive deeper on different topics.

All about Carbon

If you want to learn more about who we are and how we work, it’s all here.

You’ll see case studies here soon, so that you can learn how other teams have implemented Carbon, and pick up some tips and tricks from the processes they used.

Help

We’ve consolidated all of our support and help guidance here. You’ll find the migration guide, ways to contact us, and our FAQs.

Carbon is committed to supporting teams achieve design excellence by providing the highest quality assets as well as support for how to use Carbon to make products and digital experiences. If there’s something you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know!

Carbon is IBM’s design system, offering styles, components, patterns, and guidelines for anyone building on the web.

If you’re interested in helping out, we’re looking for contributors. Check out our projects on GitHub.

Questions or comments about Carbon? Reach out at carbon@us.ibm.com or tweet us @_carbondesign.