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4. Creating components

With two pages comprised entirely of Carbon components, let’s revisit the landing page and build a couple components of our own by using Carbon icons and tokens.

Preview

Carbon provides a solid foundation for building web applications through its color palette, layout, spacing, type, as well as common building blocks in the form of components. So far, we’ve only used Carbon components to build out two pages.

Next, we’re going to use Carbon assets to build application-specific components. We’ll do so by including accessibility and responsive considerations all throughout.

A preview of what you’ll build (see bottom of page):

Fork, clone and branch

This tutorial has an accompanying GitHub repository called carbon-tutorial that we’ll use as a starting point for each step. If you haven’t forked and cloned that repository yet, and haven’t added the upstream remote, go ahead and do so by following the step 1 instructions.

Branch

With your repository all set up, let’s check out the branch for this tutorial step’s starting point.

git fetch upstream
git checkout -b v11-react-step-4 upstream/v11-react-step-4

Note: This builds on top of step 3, but be sure to check out the upstream step 4 branch because it includes the static assets required to get through this step.

Build and start app

Install the app’s dependencies (in case you’re starting fresh in your current directory and not continuing from the previous step):

yarn

Then, start the app:

yarn start

You should see something similar to where the previous step left off.

Review design

Here’s what we’re building – an informational section that has a heading and three subheadings. Each subheading has accompanying copy and a pictogram. We’ll assume that this informational section is used elsewhere on the site, meaning it’s a great opportunity to build it as a reusable component. As for naming, we’ll call it an InfoSection with three InfoCards as children.

Info section layout

Info section layout

Create components

First we need files for the components, so create an Info folder in src/components. Even though we’re building multiple components, their names all start with Info, so it makes sense to have them share one folder in components. Create these files:

Add files

src/components/Info
├──_info.scss
├──index.js
└──Info.js

Import _info.scss in app.scss after all of the tutorial-header.scss import.

src/app.scss
@use './components/Info/info';

Like our other components, index.js will serve as an entrypoint. Since Info.js will export multiple components, we’ll use the * wildcard in the entrypoint export.

src/components/Info/index.js
export * from './Info';

InfoSection component

Let’s create the parent component that includes the “The Principles” heading. That markup currently looks like this in LandingPage.js:

src/content/LandingPage/LandingPage.js
<Column lg={16} md={8} sm={4} className="landing-page__r3">
  <Grid>
    <Column md={4} lg={4}>
      <h3 className="landing-page__label">The Principles</h3>
    </Column>
    <Column md={4} lg={4}>
      Carbon is Open
    </Column>
    <Column md={4} lg={4}>