Our Philosophy
Skeleton provides a uniform design language and structured framework for controlling the look and feel of your product and user experience. It serves as an opinionated design system that aims to greatly reduce the amount of time spent managing design elements and patterns, allowing you to more quickly build and manage your frontend interfaces at scale.
Framework Agnostic
Skeleton’s core features are framework agnostic, only requiring the use of Tailwind CSS. This provides full access to all design system features, while enabling you to standarize the design process for your framework of choice.
Native-First
We aim to embrace the interface of the web, not replace it. This is why Skeleton defaults to native browser elements and APIs whenever possible. You can see this reflected in our implementation of buttons, form elements, and many other features. Beyond ease of use, we feel this offers a huge boost to accessibility.
Standarized
We aim to standarize the design process, providing common conventions that are easy to learn and retain, whether you work alone or in a team environment. Covering common fixtures such as themes, colors, typography, spacing, and more.
Utility-First
Skeleton fully embraces the utility-first approach to styling, supporting all features provided by Tailwind, while extending it’s capabilities in meaningful ways. Skeleton builds on Tailwind’s standardization, while still supporting the encapsulated components of the modern web.
Opt-In by Default
Most features in Skeleton are modular and opt-in by default. Enabling interface features like buttons and typography via dedicated utility classes. This allows for a simple escape hatch when you need to draw outside the lines and generate custom interfaces.
Adaptive
Skeleton is intended to adapt to the design and aesthetic of your project, while still providing reasonable defaults. We provide the foundation for you to build from by mixing our various primitive features or using the style props for each component. Skeleton also comes equipped with a powerful theme generator for crafting custom themes for those that are design savvy, while also providing a curated set of themes for those that are not.
Functional Components
We prioritize native first, but there will be times where you need to go further. For this, Skeleton provides an optional suite of functional components built atop the foundation of Zag.js. These components automatically adapt to the Skeleton design system out of the box. We currently support React and Svelte, with plans to extend to additional frameworks in the near future.
Additional Benefits
Open Source
Skeleton provides as free and open-source software (FOSS) under the MIT License.
The Community
Skeleton boasts a vast community of users and contributors across GitHub, Discord, and Bluesky.
Frequent Updates
Skeleton has maintained a set release cadence for years. Just take a look at our changelog.
Figma UI Kit
Skeleton provides access to a fully featured Figma UI Kit to assist designers in drafting a visual concept of upcoming projects.
Get Started
Using Skeleton
Ready to get started? Check out our comprehensive installation guides and begin learning the fundamentals.
Contributing
Please refer to our dedicated Contribution Guidelines if you wish to contribute directly.