
Fabricator – modular website design system - im_dario
https://fbrctr.github.io
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tariqr
Great! Looks quite extensive and deeply thought-out at first glance. Respect
for the discipline required to ship something like this by yourself. Keep at
it :) Iterate till you win.

Some constructive criticism, if it helps: it takes a while to understand what
this is. On the home page, if you can have two panes, some code on the left
with your framework and output on the right to quickly get a grasp perhaps?

Good luck!

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lukeaskew
Thanks for the feedback. I'll see what I can do to make the purpose of the
project a little more clear.

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canyonero
My two cents: I work for a medium-sized company that has used Fabricator to
build UI component libraries for clients. In each project where Fabricator was
used, the deliverable source code (CSS and JS) has been both messy and
inconsistent. This is due to that fact that Fabricator does not assist or
guide the developer when they develop CSS and JS for their modular design
components. (See [http://fbrctr.github.io/building-a-
toolkit/assets.html](http://fbrctr.github.io/building-a-toolkit/assets.html))
This diminishes any ability to reuse components/widgets/atoms etc across
projects.

The tool does enforce and encourage atomic design architecture when it comes
to HTML. At best, I'd describe Fabricator as a static-site/documentation
generator. However, I wouldn't recommend using it Fabricator to generate
documentation in the 'toolkit' way that's recommended in it the docs because
it tightly couples that static site/documentation generation to UI library
source. There are plenty of static site generators that work well for
generating docs that I'd rather use (jekyll, hugo, etc).

I'd encourage developers considering Fabricator to proceed with caution.
Although, it boasts ease of UI development based on atomic designs, the tool
does not aide in code modularity or UI component re-usablity.

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rrrx3
Interesting. Looking around at the source now, it looks like it's not
optimized to imply that sort of architectural thinking. That's a bummer. I'd
love to have seen it take the React style approach of co-locating all the
relevant parts to a module together.

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dgreensp
What is Fabricator? A framework?

Edit: A UI toolkit-toolkit for building design systems.

~~~
lukeaskew
It's really a set of tools to help you build a design system/toolkit. My goal
was to bootstrap the development of (Twitter) Bootstraps for clients.

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hahamrfunnyguy
Nice looking design, but I had no clue what the tool was because I had clicked
though too the documentation first! Also, say something about what problems
pertaining to design guides this tool solves specifically somewhere front and
center.

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lukeaskew
Yikes. I haven't revisited the site copy/design since I launched it months
ago. I'll see what I can do to make the messaging more clear. You're right, it
takes a bit of digging to discover what Fabricator actually does.

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gboudrias
I like the logo!

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lukeaskew
Done by the super-talented Abby Putinski [https://dribbble.com/abby-
putinski](https://dribbble.com/abby-putinski)

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vs2
why?

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TeMPOraL
Because a big part of learning is reinventing the wheel. Bonus points for
creating a whole new taxonomy for things that have decades-old names in the
industry :).

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Spone
Which "decades-old names" are you referring to?

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TeMPOraL
For instance:

[http://fbrctr.github.io/getting-started/what-is-a-
toolkit.ht...](http://fbrctr.github.io/getting-started/what-is-a-toolkit.html)

Reading this I see a lot of things described by new names that we're used to
know as "components", "modules" or "widgets".

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Gigablah
And the page calls them "modules". Where is the new "taxonomy" you describe?

