Component library documentation addons

Documentation helps teams reuse existing work instead of rebuilding new UI. It’s doubly important in component libraries and design systems because they’re intended for wide distribution.

However, documentation often takes more work than folks expect. You end up sinking time into non-documentation tasks like site infrastructure, wrangling technical writers, and maintenance instead of actually writing docs.

Storybook already provides lightweight documentation out of the box (although we don’t call it that) by naturally encouraging developers to save UI component variations as “stories”. Documentation addons amplify this core capability to help interdisciplinary teams stay in sync.

The official Storybook Docs addon generates a customizable documentation site for your component library or design system. It succeeds the popular info addon with first class support for Markdown, MDX, and JSDoc syntax.

Under the hood, SB Docs uses industry-standard docgen tooling to build API docs from stories. Bring design artifacts into SB Docs by embedding them via an iframe from Figma or Sketch (with Abstract).

InVision DSM is a design system documentation tool. It helps design teams consolidate UX principles, user interface design, usage guidelines, tokens, and more in a shared documentation site.

DSM allows you to view Storybook components in the DSM app alongside the designs (which are extracted from Sketch). Teams can interact with the UI component implementation in the context of the design system before integrating it in their apps.

Zeplin is a design handoff tool that generates styleguides from design files. It auto extracts metadata like assets, colors, and measurements from design files to make it easier for developers to adhere to the design spec. Zeplin allows you to link off to Storybook components from inside their desktop app.

In addition,

Zeroheight is a collaborative styleguide generator for design systems. It showcases design, code, brand, and copywriting documentation in one place. Users can easily edit that documentation with a WYSIWYG editor. The addon brings Storybook components into Zeroheight to display alongside Sketch, Figma, or Adobe XD designs.

UI components are the source of truth for designers and developers alike. Story2sketch allows you to build a Sketch file from components in Storybook. This helps designers keep their Sketch files current with the latest UI patterns.

A “design token” is a styling constant for variables like typography, colors, spacing, and animation. Tokens are distributed by design systems for reuse across many projects. This addon extracts design token documentation from your stylesheets to display during development.