Backlight

Industry: Developer Tools

Technologies: JavaScript, Typescript, React.js, React Native, SASS, CSS3, HTML5, Web Components

Team size: 2

Partnership: 2021-2022

Developer tools |

Project Description

Backlight empowers front-end teams to build and ship great design systems. A unique, all-in-one design system solution.
It's a browser based development environment to be used for building design systems.
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across different pages and channels.
This platform addresses the need of creating a design system with common tools between developers and designers, to be reused and expanded while eliminating redundant work between the front-end teams. Basically, reusable components and tokens can be created while being showcased live via a story and a markdown integrated document.

The Challenge

The challenges met here by our team was to create and maintain design systems starter kits with different technologies while also building the tools for it.

Different front-end tools and libraries were needed, to address a wide range of professionals: React, React Native, Svelte, Vue, Web Components, Shadow DOM, and so on. While our team had the necessary expertise for front-end development some of these technologies were new to us as well. We had to learn, adapt and deliver quickly.

The team is very professional.

No nonsense. Just pure techs.

Georges Gomes, Co-Founder & CEO, ‹div›RIOTS

“

Our Approach

We joined the team at a very early stage, the Backlight team had very few members and we integrated quickly. As part of the team we worked hard to understand the needs of the users and how we can address them via Backlight studio.

After a good plan was in place we began developing and showcasing different design system starter kits for: Material UI, React Native Paper, Tailwind CSS, React Aria, React System UI and dockits for React and Core Javascript.
While delivering these design system starter kits and dockits we also helped improve the product itself by implementing the onboarding step-by-step feature and fixing other issues.

Our Contribution

The product launch reached position #5 on Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/products/backlight by filling an important gap for software product teams.
Backlight has thousands of users and is gaining new ones daily. As a statistic: 9,688 Design systems created in 2022. Thanks to our contribution also, this is an important product that's here to stay.