Why Backlight?

We have been working on Backlight within closed doors with early access customers for more than 2 years now. This month, we launched publicly and everybody can now experience Backlight by themselves.

Where is Backlight coming from?

I have been working with Francois and Gregory for a decade now. Backlight is born from our pain when building multiple front-ends in a previous life.

• How to build consistent front-end experiences?
• How to have accessibility built-in everywhere?
• How to avoid re-creating the same thing multiple times?
• How to help recruits use existing components?
• How to keep quality and maintainability under control?
• How to keep Developers and Designers in sync?

The answer is to build a Design System

But Design Systems are very expensive to build. 😰

Unless you are a large firm, with the budget to have a dedicated Design System Team, you can’t build your design system from scratch. It’s just too expensive while business features are piling up.

On top of that, Design Systems require team efforts that involves Designers and Developers at every single step. Existing tools are just not embracing this collaboration requirement.

But Backlight is here now!

🚀 Backlight comes with several starter-kits to lower the cost of starting a design system. We have starter-kits or samples in React, Vue, Svelte, Web Components, and more on the way.

👩‍💻 Backlight is an online IDE with git integration.

• Designers love it because it’s visual and they don’t need to do npm install, npm something or learn 10 git commands in order to contribute.

• Developers love it for rapid development and quick experimentations on the Design System. But they can still use their local IDE with Backlight’s CLI.

🤗 Backlight embraces collaboration between Developers and Designers with instant sharing capabilities.

🔎 Reviewing HTML and CSS code only tells part of the story. Backlight speeds up every step of reviews by rendering components as a first-class citizen.

🖼 Backlight promotes component-driven development with support for Storybook’s Component Story Format.

📖 Backlight has built-in documentation support so you can write your design system documentation site next to your components. Always nearby and painless to maintain.

🧪 Backlight supports unit-tests with real-time reports. Unit-tests a must-have to prevent fixed bugs to come back or control that accessibility stays after improvements.

📐 Designers have their own design space in Backlight with integration with Figma, Adobe xD and Sketch. Code and design in one place.

📦 The release management of your Design System is built-in. So you can release your Design System as an npm package in pretty much one click.

🏭 Backlight acts as your Design System tooling platform. You don’t need to build a complex CI - update it, improve it or maintain it. We do it for you so you can focus on building the actual value: your design system.

🔓 No lock-in; Backlight only uses standard Web technologies, so you can take your design system out at any time and build it on your own.

🔮 And so much more to come!

Experience Backlight today!

🆓 Up to 3 users can collaborate on a Design System for free! Ideal for startups and freelancers working on a design system.

🚀 Get started with your first design system in no time with one of our starter-kits.

💬 Join our community on discord to discuss any aspects of design systems like design-tokens definitions, component-driven development, or creating helpful documentation sites.