Photo by Alexander Kagan on Unsplash

Today, the Clarity Design System is releasing version 1.0 of its library of Angular components, HTML and CSS framework, and icons library.

Before I go too far into what that means for our community, I would like to take a moment and acknowledge what a tremendous achievement this is. When we started Clarity, our hope was to bring consistency, sustainability, good citizenship, and great design to VMware’s suite of products.

Our journey led us to open source Clarity, followed by widespread adoption by VMware and several other large corporations, and finally emerging as one the most popular open source projects in VMware’s history. It has been a privilege to be a part of the Clarity team these past few years.

Here’s a quick countdown:

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Three

Clarity is three years old.

When we began, we worked together to create what is today known as the Clarity Design System — a suite of HTML/CSS and Angular components built upon web standards and opinionated UX patterns. Our team started out driven by a commitment to improving user experience and making something that would be easy for our designers and developers to use.

These have been our guiding lights and continue to inspire us every day.

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Two

In November of that first year, the Clarity Design System went open source.

We have now been open-source for two years. This has been a huge benefit to our partners and third parties who rely on VMware products, customize workflows for VMware products and build plug-ins on which their own customers rely.

Moreover, the open source community has been passionate, engaged, and supportive. External contributors account for 1 out of 20 issues that are resolved in our Github repository. Many of these contributions are significant, like the alerts pager and bug fixes for our datagrid.

We are thankful to have such a strong community that is so committed to the success of Clarity. It is one of the reasons we have been able to deliver 1.0 to you today! ❤️

1.0

From its humble beginnings of being hosted on a computer we found underneath our design lead’s desk, the last stretch towards 1.0 has seen Clarity grow, mature, and attain new heights.

Our team members are regularly sharing their knowledge and experience at Angular conferences all over the world, including ngChina, ngAtlanta, and ngConf in Salt Lake City this year alone.

We have proven to be a valued project in the Angular community. Companies both large and small are choosing Clarity.

Even during our pre-1.0 days, the stability and maturity of our library far exceeded its age. Despite an aggressive release schedule, we have had only 8 patch releases to date. This means that we have averaged one regression every 4 months over a span of 128 weeks.

This is a direct result of the Clarity team’s commitment to putting UX first, building on top of web and accessibility standards, and putting a premium on doing things right.

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What’s Next?

After 96 consecutive weeks of releasing at least one version of Clarity every Thursday (even on holiday weeks!), our team is embracing a model of long-term support that follows the release schedule of the Angular library. This makes sense because Angular is one of the only dependencies our library has.

We can also now use major, minor, and patch versions as intended in semantic versioning. We will also be able to release minor and patch versions off-schedule when changes are ready for our users.

Soon, the Clarity team will be meeting to build our roadmap for 2.0. We have a lot of features to discuss and we plan to continue being as transparent as we can with our community about what we are working on and why.

This has been an exciting three years. But this is just a milestone, not an end. After 1.0, I’m sure we will have a few growing pains with the new delivery model but I’m confident that the team that got us here is capable of moving us forward.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to making this a reality! I look forward to the next phase of our epic journey as we continue our commitment to great code, usable components, and exceptional user experience.