Styling Hillary: A Design System for All Americans
summary
Built a modular CSS design system called Pantsuit that rewrites the UI across dozens of codebases and powers multiple apps on hillaryclinton.com while remaining opt‑in via CDN npm or manual download. One engineer authors CSS architecture and docs with KSS node, publishes to S3 and npm, and pings release notes into Slack. Version one ships in six weeks, supports ~80 engineers and 100+ micro sites, enables a site redesign and fast deployments but cannot be open sourced for security and impersonation risks.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Start
- 4:47Design System? Pattern Library? Styleguide?
- 4:59Naming things is hard.
- 5:33Style Guide: The documentation resource for the design system
- 5:48Design System: The entirety of the standardized Ul patterns, framework, assets, and documentation
- 6:56Pantsuit? Pantsuit!
- 10:36Team: Me.
- 14:12Need for Speed
- 20:04Communication
- 23:04Documention
- 25:15The documentation for Pantsuit is a great example of form following function: it served as a source of inspiration as well as a how-to.
- 25:54Collaboration
- 28:03Pantsuit Council
- 32:09Reddit is a wasteland.
- 35:35Open Source
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