Building a Design System with Ark UI
When building a design system, one of the biggest challenges is creating components that are not just visually appealing, but also consistent, accessible, and easy to maintain across your entire app.
That's where Ark UI comes in handy!
Ark UI is a headless, accessible component library that provides unstyled UI primitives like modals, avatars, accordions, and more. Since Ark UI ships without predefined styles, it gives you complete freedom to implement your own design system, exactly how you want it.
In this design system series, we'll explore how to style Ark UI components using two different approaches:
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Vanilla CSS: This approach allows you to design your components with CSS using Ark UI anatomy.
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Panda CSS: This approach uses a zero runtime styling engine built pair nicely with Ark UI. We'll look at how to use recipes and design tokens to create scalable styles.
Prerequisites
To get started in this series, you'll need the following:
Throughout this series, you'll learn how to build a design system with Ark UI components and styling them with Vanilla CSS or Panda CSS.
You'll also start to think in recipes, a concept where styles for each component part and its variants (like size, shape, or visual style) are bundled into a single, reusable definition. Recipes help you create consistent, modular, and scalable components for your design system needs.
Let's dive in!