Design system manager · https://ds.soloshape.com

Solo Shape
Design System

A grayscale, product-neutral contract from which every Solo Shape application is built. The manager governs tokens, elements, intrinsic layout, accessibility, responsive evidence, distribution, and offline safety; client applications own their compositions and identity.

Contract recommendation

Treat this repository as the root UI dependency, not a gallery to copy from. If a client needs a missing primitive, add and prove it here first, issue an observable release, then vendor that exact release into the client.

Wide desktop screenshots are valid reference evidence, but they do not define responsive architecture. Once a desktop composition is mapped to proven elements and layout primitives, its narrow and intermediate behavior follows the same constraint contracts.

0
design tokens
0
public elements
0
intrinsic layouts
0
utility icons
v5.0.0-rc.2
candidate contract
01

Design principles

Six rules resolve the majority of design-system decisions before a client-specific visual choice is made.

P1

Constraint first

Design for the space a component actually receives. Intrinsic layout and container behavior come before device-specific exceptions.

P2

Grayscale is the truth test

Hierarchy, status, focus, and affordance must survive without hue. Client color enriches meaning but never creates it alone.

P3

One public vocabulary

Stable IDs, exports, ss-* roots, --ss-* tokens, and private data-slot anatomy mean the same thing in every Solo Shape application.

P4

Behavior belongs to elements

Keyboard models, focus, validation, loading, disabled states, and reduced motion are solved once at the root.

P5

Local at runtime

Every consumer bundles its UI inputs and remains useful offline. The manager is never a production CSS, font, icon, token, or behavior CDN.

P6

Observable change

A structural change is versioned, checksummed, documented, tested, and rollback-capable. Nothing silently mutates beneath a client.

02

Manager map

The active catalog documents the public contract; governance surfaces expose evidence, lifecycle, and release mechanics.

SectionWhat lives there
FoundationsColour, typography, spacing, radius, borders & elevation — the token layer.
MotionEasing by job, duration by size, three user-selectable paces.
Motion labThe staging ground — currently all clear. Where every behaviour lives now, and what was decided against.
Design labSandbox for forking real components — token, CSS, and motion overrides previewed safely against canonical.
IconographyThe solo-shape system mark and the product-neutral thin/filled utility icon library.
ElementsThe ID-first public contract catalog: every primitive and intrinsic layout, with lifecycle evidence.
CombinationsEvery element under each new axis tier — the reviewer surface for evaluating axes at close.
PatternsReference recipes for common compositions of elements. Consumers implement each pattern locally per charter §3.
ApplicationAccessibility, guardrails, what is locked and what stays loose.
AuditRegistry-driven coverage — every token, icon and class reconciled against real usage.
DistributionVersioned exports and how consumer apps stay in sync.
PublishPromote a ready Labs experiment into the canonical registry — classifier, blast-radius, shared-vs-scoped decision per change.

The public element source is the ID-first manifest at Elements. The older class inventory remains manager-only provenance until the v5 disposition is complete; it is excluded from the versioned consumer artifact.

ds-solo-shape · solo-shape Design System v5.0.0-rc.2 · release candidate · no external deployment was performed by this build