Unux

This is the initial draft for uNUX (unsungNovelty user experience) design system. This has been an idea that’s been in my head for a while. The below page as of now is just theoretical version of what I want to achieve with this design system and the whys and hows. Obviously, there are gaping holes in it currently. That’s cos there are known unknowns and then there are some unknown unknowns. The page is supposed to be a living document with future updates regularly (Atleast that is the idea. That this being public will make me invest more time in it). uNUX also has some big big dreams behind it which I hope will eventually help it to grow beyond just a design system. Honestly, I don’t know if this will work. But the idea if not anything else, this will help me learn more about design.

Motivation

This is a long answer. The major reason is UI/UX has degraded more and more over the years. With Apple’s Liquid Glass being as abysmal as it is now, it is high time to think about UI/UX improvements. Software these days are disruptive, non uniform, non-standardised and a lot more hollow. It looks super fancy just until you start looking under the rug and it breaks easily. As a layman with very less design experience, I can’t techinically explain it out on paper yet. Which is why - uNUX. I know A design system is supposed be a textbook implementation of how a software is supposed to work. This means the look, feel and flow of the software. The performance and the reactionary elements and everything in between the UI/UX part.

Another reason is my recent migration experience from Tailwind CSS v3 to v4 for Brahma which powers this site. It didn’t go as planned with breaking changes. And my website which I have created and finnessed over the years has so many papercuts now. This is common and nothing new during major version bumps. But this gave me an excuse to explore my design tastes more and Brahma is currently under a rewrite in pure CSS. This will help me do the below things:

  1. Faster feature additions
  2. Better control on the design direction
  3. No more NPM! This means even more simpler setup.
  4. Better performance, small site size and a lil more posh features.

As of now, this is just a collection of different set of ideas and resources I have collected over the years. The plan is to explore them further to help me shape uNUX. Hopefully it will shape up to be the backbone of my projects. I am expecting it to be crappy initially. But I hope the heart I think this project has will eventually make it better.

References / Links