Primer
Resources, tooling, and design guidelines for building websites with Primer, GitHub's front-end framework.
Introduction
Our goal is to create a system that enables us to build consistent user experiences with ease, yet with enough flexibility to support the broad spectrum of GitHub websites. This goal is embedded in our design and code decisions. Our approach to CSS is influenced by Object Oriented CSS principles, functional CSS, and BEM architecture.
This style guide is living documentation that will be updated as we continue to improve and evolve our design system.
- Styles overview
- Primer packages
Section contents
Highly reusable, flexible styles
Styles can be mixed and matched to achieve many different layouts, independent of their location. These styles fall into three categories:
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Utilities
Single purpose, immutable styles, that do one thing well.
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Objects
Scaffolding for common page and content layouts.
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Components
Abstracted patterns for frequently used visual styles.
Systematically designed for GitHub
Primer is built upon systems that form the foundation of our styles such as spacing, typography, and color. This systematic approach helps ensure our styles are consistent and interoperable with each other.
Highly composable spacing scale
The base-8 spacing scale is highly composable and works with the density of GitHub’s content. Margin and padding spacers bring consistency to vertical and horizontal rhythm, while remaining flexible so you can tweak layouts to work for every context.
Customizable typography
Font size and line-height options work together to result in more sensible numbers. Font styles come in a range of weights and sizes so that we can style appropriately for content and readability. Type utilities allow us to change the visual styles while keeping markup semantic.
Meaningful color
The color system allows us to add meaningful signals to content and interactions. Color variables and utilities offer thematic styling options without being tied to structure. Text and background colors come in a range of accessible combinations to ensure we build inclusive interfaces.
Primer packages
Each component or group of styles is packaged up and distributed via npm. Primer includes 23 packages that are grouped into useful meta-packages for easy install. Each package and meta-package is independently versioned and distributed via npm, so it's easy to include all or part of Primer within your own project.
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The core package contains modules that are shared between GitHub product and marketing websites.
13 packages:
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The product package contains modules that are used on GitHub product websites.
10 packages:
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The marketing package contains modules that are used on GitHub marketing websites.
8 packages:
Use Primer in your project
Pick and choose what you need. Install the entire Primer bundle or individual packages via npm.
Installation instructions