One year of Clarity
It’s already been a year since we open sourced. What a journey.
One year ago, on November 15th 2016, we released Clarity as an open source design system. Since then, it’s been a wonderful experience. We’re really excited to spend some time looking back and even more time looking forward at where Clarity is going and how we’re doubling down on our investment in Clarity and open source.
Let’s look at the numbers
In the past 12 months since open sourcing, we:
- Released 52+ times. Our weekly release cadence did not stop and we have no plans of slowing down.
- Those releases included 600+ pull requests.
- Resolved and closed 850+ issues on GitHub.
- Have seen over 2.5 million page views on our website (even though our SEO needed help which it will get soon).
- 2600+ stars added on github.
- 600,000+ NPM Downloads across all of our Clarity packages.
Within VMware
Within VMware, Clarity has grown tremendously. From a small project in the corner of VMware’s engineering organization to one of the most foundational projects the company has done in UI as of recently.
Eighteen months ago, Clarity did not exist. No design thoughts, no code. and no hints for what it could become.
Within 18 months from Clarity’s inception to today, all of VMware’s product portfolio has moved to use Clarity as its design system. This has been a huge feat for a company the size of ours. How open source helped make that possible deserves a post of its own.
Lessons learned
There are too many lessons to list here, and this deserves its own blog post, but we thought we’d list a couple:
Embrace open source
This was a tough one for us at VMware but if you’re going open source, go fully open source. Clarity does not maintain any internal issue tracking software, we do not release internal builds of Clarity, and we do not prioritize issues outside of the community’s eyes.
All of Clarity is open source. This is important. It’s been important in making sure our community can build the trust in us and our process but it has also allowed us to maintain the integrity of Clarity and our technical architecture. Being open source allowed to build software we’re proud of sharing externally and we’re able to actually share in a way a design system should: generically.
There are two things we maintain internally still: email (we have to communicate!) and Slack (we have to communicate with VMware designers and engineers!).
Consistency matters
This is true for a design system but it is also true for an open source project. Our ability to consistently release every single week and having a consistent way of delivering Clarity has helped tremendously in building Clarity’s credibility within and outside of VMware.
Things get harder, keep pushing
As the project matures, the development and design challenges you are solving are by default harder. Releases, although remain weekly, hold less major items and new components. That’s okay. You have to embrace and understand the project maturity level but do not confuse that with the productivity of the team, which remains high, and the team’s ability to solve these complex issues.
Looking ahead
We have a lot of plans in store.
- We’re keeping our focus on reaching stability with version 1.0 with clarity-angular and adding a few much anticipated components like the date picker, search, and select 2.0. We’re doubling down on our investment in Clarity this year.
- We’re focusing our design efforts on better understanding how Clarity works within VMware software (and with outside partners) so we can learn, study, research, and quickly improve not just the underlying implementation but also the design patterns themselves.
- We’re focusing on the design of coherent patterns and groups of patterns that work well together. Our design focus is going to be templates, multi-component patterns, and workflow patterns. More on that soon!
Finally …
Finally, I’ve personally had the honor of working with the best of designers and engineers in the industry. The best of Clarity is yet to come.
Make sure you follow us to learn more: @VMwareClarity.
