Carbon

カーボン / 2016– / Style / Design Systems

IBM's openly published and maintained design system, the working form of the IBM Design Language. Its skeleton is the 2x Grid, where an eight pixel mini unit is halved or doubled to size everything, the IBM Plex typeface, and a color model that stacks neutral grays as layers with one core blue reserved for action.

Rectangular controls with almost no corner radius, and input fields ruled only along the bottom edge / White and #f4f4f4 surfaces stacked alternately, the ground shifting one step in value at every layer / A single blue, #0f62fe, appearing only where something can be acted on, everything else near neutral / One typeface family, IBM Plex, from display headings down to captions, with nothing else mixed in

Images at the source page

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Shipping an enterprise admin screen in both a light and a dark theme without redesigning either · Giving several teams a shared and explainable basis for spacing and column widths
Type: Set everything in IBM Plex, using the tighter productive styles in product and the larger expressive styles for editorial. Pick sizes from the published steps rather than inventing them.
Composition: Base the geometry on the eight pixel mini unit. Derive columns by starting at one and halving, and keep every margin and padding a whole multiple of the unit.
Material: Stack gray surfaces as layers and shift the ground one value step wherever a layer changes. Spend the blue only on things that can be acted on, and keep alert colors separate.
Caution: Hard coding hex values breaks the layering the moment the theme flips between light and dark, because the whole system assumes color is chosen by role instead.
Further study: Carbon の 2x Grid の解説にある mini unit の考え方 / productive と expressive という2つの型セットの使い分け / White テーマと Gray 100 テーマで層モデルがどう反転するか

Related entries

Cite this entry

The dictionary is meant to be linked to. Take whichever form fits where you are writing.

Link: https://indexstyle.org/styles/carbon
Markdown: [Carbon — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/carbon)
HTML: <a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/carbon">Carbon — IndexStyle</a>

Back to index position