May 28, 2020

Issue 2: Contributions, Tables, and a Roadmap

Issue 2

We’re Moving Now!

Hello, all of our ESD design & development friends! We’ve made some great progress since our last newsletter, and we can’t wait to share.

Whether it’s pushing forward on consolidating the design system documentation, or building the foundation of a collaborative system that we can all be proud of, there’s something this month for everyone.

Hey, designers! Do you work with a developer that should know these things?

Please forward them this email and ask them to subscribe.

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For Us, By Us

Do you have an idea about something that could be better in Mineral? Is there a part of Mineral that doesn't quite work for your problem, but a small tweak would make it much better? We want to hear about your ideas, problems, and suggestions, and we want to help you contribute the improvements back into the system.

Mineral is a collaboratively maintained design system, and is made up of the great contributions of many designers and developers. As part of our reinvigorated effort to keep Mineral thriving, we’re making sure we have a clearly articulated process for you to add your latest brilliant ideas and work.

Check out the Mineral Contribution Process.

What We Bring to the Table(s)

Data-rich products and applications live and breath on presenting data in easy to consume ways. A big ingredient in that is tables. Not only are they utilitarian workhorses, they are also a big part of creating useful and usable experiences.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken a close look at tables in Mineral as we’ve cleaned up some of our documentation. Mostly, our approach is unchanged, but there were a couple areas where we lacked clear guidance, and so that was added. Those newly addressed areas are:

1. Nested/expanding rows
2. Table density options (originally sparked by the Rally team)

Take a look at the Figma specs, and let us know what you think!

Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads

But we do need a map.

There is a lot of great guidance in Mineral already, and it’s only going to get better. There are so many areas that need to be addressed and so many ideas to be considered. This is going to be a long journey, and is going to take a while for us to get to a point where it’s effective and valuable for all situations.

To help us stay organized on this endeavor, we’ve started to keep a list of what we want Mineral to contain. It’s not a full-blown roadmap yet, but like Mineral itself, it’s a good starting point.

If you’re interested in taking a look at what’s on our radar, check out the roadmap.

Up Next

We're still working on consolidating all of the documentation out there into a single, trustworthy location. Here's some more plans of ours:

1. [Insert Your Contribution or Question Here]

   Any contributions to, or questions about using, Mineral will be our top priority. We're ready to help you make our system better for all of us, every step of the way.

2. Tokens

   We're working hard to capture and distribute the changes to Mineral in a new tokens package, to replace mineral-ui-tokens.

3. More Components

   We will continue to design, theme, and extend more components. If you have an immediate need, please let us know.