🦄 Unicorn Core

Unicorn Design System is an open source design system built at UNICEF New Zealand. We've built it with web components and stencil to ensure it works between frameworks.

Getting Started

This package is our core Web Component library, for use on the web platform.

If you're using React, check out the React version.

Unicorn requires a global stylesheet to be loaded (for global typography and color vars,) documentation for this is a work in progress. For now, please make sure it's loaded.

To install the library:

npm install @unicorndesign/core

Then, to load the components with a bundler such as webpack:

import '@unicorndesign/core/theming/prebuilt/default.css';
import { applyPolyfills, defineCustomElements } from '@unicorndesign/core/loader';

// Optional, depending on your browser targets 
await applyPolyfills();

await defineCustomElements(window);

Alternatively, you can use a script tag:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/@unicorndesign/core@^1.0.0/theming/prebuilt/default.css">

<!-- Differential imports for modern browsers -->
<script type="module" src="https://unpkg.com/@unicorndesign/core@^1.0.0/dist/unicorn/unicorn.esm.js"></script>
<script nomodule src="https://unpkg.com/@unicorndesign/core@^1.0.0/dist/unicorn/unicorn.js"></script>

Then, go ahead and use Unicorn!

<uni-button icon>🦄</uni-button>

Stencil Guide

Stencil is also great for building entire apps. For that, use the stencil-app-starter instead.

Stencil is a compiler for building fast web apps using Web Components.

Stencil combines the best concepts of the most popular frontend frameworks into a compile-time rather than run-time tool. Stencil takes TypeScript, JSX, a tiny virtual DOM layer, efficient one-way data binding, an asynchronous rendering pipeline (similar to React Fiber), and lazy-loading out of the box, and generates 100% standards-based Web Components that run in any browser supporting the Custom Elements v1 spec.

Stencil components are just Web Components, so they work in any major framework or with no framework at all.

Naming Components

When creating new component tags, we recommend not using stencil in the component name (ex: <stencil-datepicker>). This is because the generated component has little to nothing to do with Stencil; it's just a web component!

Instead, use a prefix that fits your company or any name for a group of related components. For example, all of the Ionic generated web components use the prefix ion.

Using this component

Script tag

• Publish to NPM
• Put a script tag similar to this <script src='https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/mycomponent.js'></script> in the head of your index.html
• Then you can use the element anywhere in your template, JSX, html etc

Node Modules

• Run npm install my-component --save
• Put a script tag similar to this <script src='node_modules/my-component/dist/mycomponent.js'></script> in the head of your index.html
• Then you can use the element anywhere in your template, JSX, html etc