Building a Design System with Storybook and Tailwind CSS
Learn how to create a robust and maintainable design system from scratch. We'll cover setting up Storybook, integrating Tailwind CSS, and documenting components effectively.
A design system is the single source of truth for your application's UI. It ensures consistency, speeds up development, and improves collaboration between designers and developers. In this guide, we'll build one using two powerful tools: Tailwind CSS for utility-first styling and Storybook for component documentation and isolation. The process starts by setting up a new project and running 'npx storybook init'. Once Storybook is running, you can integrate Tailwind by following its installation guide and configuring Storybook's preview.js to import your global CSS file. From there, you can start building your components. For example, a Button component can be built using Tailwind classes for styling, and its different states (primary, secondary, disabled, loading) can be documented as separate 'stories' in Storybook. This creates an interactive catalog of your UI components that serves as living documentation for the entire team.