Who uses Carbon?
Carbon is for each and every member of a cross-functional team—designers, developers, marketers and offering managers. Every point along a user’s journey needs to feel part of a holistic, branded experience and that’s where Carbon comes in.
Designers
Designers are passionate advocates for users, and Carbon helps them provide value to our users with accessible, fully-tested assets and guidance that designers can rely on to create cohesive experiences that are in line with other business units.
How Carbon helps designers
Carbon supports designers with the tools to build excellent experiences for our users that are consistent, delightful, and thoughtful. Designers can quickly create tailored solutions for our clients, drawing on Carbon’s reusable kit of parts. This saves valuable time that can be spent on innovating new solutions.
In addition, Carbon enables product and .com designers across the organization to explore and deliver the full potential of a design, leveraging the work of other teams where possible, avoiding redesign and duplication of efforts, keeping the focus on the distinct client use cases.
Here are some ways designers can begin engaging with Carbon.
Learn the system
Familiarize yourself with the Carbon foundational elements, their usage documentation, and the system’s design principles.
Familiarize yourself with usage and style guidance for all of Carbon’s components and patterns.
Check out design tutorials to learn more about some of the foundational pieces of the design system.
Get the tools
Visit the Get started page to install the Figma design kits.
Visit the Other resources page to find other useful tools and plugins.
Connect with the team
Find meetups for leveling up your skills, connecting with your peers, and getting reviews on work in progress.
If you’re confused or if you’ve spotted an inconsistency, reach out on our IBM Slack channels. At this time, the Slack channels are for IBMers only.
Make a GitHub issue when you find a bug or want to request a feature.
Keep up with the latest
Stay up to date with Carbon’s enhancements roadmap.
See what issues are being tackled right now.
Contribute back to Carbon
Contribute component and/or pattern enhancements, or create new assets, stewarded by the Carbon team.
Author usage documentation for patterns and components.
Create tooling, especially as related to design kits in various frameworks.
Explore scalable system logic such as token additions or inline theming.
Connect with the Carbon team to share work in progress and assess its suitability for universal guidance.
Developers
Carbon provides developers with the tools they need to build more product in less time, while saving them from the mind-numbing work of creating the same base components over and over again.
How Carbon helps developers
By leveraging Carbon’s pre-built assets, developers free themselves (and their backlogs) up to do the innovative work that inspires them and ultimately elevates the user experience for our clients.
Developers can create products that are cohesive with other business units—high-quality, consistent, and robust front-end experiences that share the IBM brand.
Here are some ways developers can begin engaging with Carbon.
Learn the system
Familiarize yourself with the Carbon foundational elements, the usage documentation, and the system’s design principles.
Check out a tutorial in your framework of choice (React, Angular (community) or Vue (community)).
Get the tools
Visit Developing > Get started and install your framework of choice.
Visit Developer resources to find Carbon tools, as well as our GitHub repos and Storybooks for your framework of choice.
Connect with the team
Find meetups for leveling up your skills, connecting with your peers, and getting reviews on work in progress.
If you’re confused or if you’ve spotted an inconsistency, reach out on our IBM Slack channels. At this time, the Slack channels are for IBMers only.