Building Beautiful Sites With Gatsby

Building beautiful websites means getting a lot of little things right.

Typography. Spacing. Repetition. Color. Contrast. Images. Hierarchy. Responsiveness. Alignment.

Beauty means the right building blocks, assembled correctly. Beauty requires creativity, not just the absence of flaws. Beauty needs consistency; it’s broken by perennial one-off adjustments. A beautiful website isn’t just the finished, loaded page; it’s also the process of getting there.

Create beautifully-designed, reusable components

Because Gatsby is built on React, you can easily integrate component-based design systems into your website development process. Forget reinventing the wheel in five different CMS frameworks — with a component library, your design team can focus on creating one beautiful version of each component, which your development team can then use everywhere.

Build off well-established, existing libraries, like IBM’s Carbon Design System and Palantir’s Blueprint — or create your own. Curate and coordinate component development across teams with tools like Storybook.

From accordions to zoom buttons, Gatsby and React empower your team to create beautiful, reusable components.

IBM’s Carbon Design system

Easily create clean, consistent typography

Crafting a look and feel that’s consistent and reflects brand personality is key for content-driven sites. Yet often designers can be removed from the development process.

With Gatsby’s built-in Typography.js integration, it’s easy for designers and developers to collaborate on header ratios, font size and line spacing rhythm across your whole site, while preventing text styling from devolving into a series of one-off CSS modifications without a coherent theme.

Typography.js demo

Drop in a beautiful image loading experience

Gatsby’s image primitives display blurred image versions immediately, with smooth fade-in while the page loads. Images preserve their place in the page, never bumping it down while they load.

Gatsbygram

This technique is known as SVG placeholders, and is a cutting-edge image optimization technique only available on a few platforms such as Gatsby, CraftCMS and Medium.

While initially envisioned as a performance optimization, SVG placeholders provides a beautiful loading experience that is becoming increasingly popular in modern, cutting-edge websites.

Conclusion

We believe that to work more effectively and build more beautiful sites, developers and designers need higher-level tools. Augment web primitives like HTML, CSS, and images with Gatsby — build with React components, design systems, gatsby-image, and typography systems.

Easily compose higher-order visual blocks, you can bring visual consistency to your website out-of-the-box.

Read more:

• See the Gatsbygram demo site.
• See different types of image processing on Using Gatsby Image.
• See font size ratios and line spacing rhythm on the Typography.js official demo.
• Read a first-hand story about using gatsby-image.
• See the Whittle School website, built with Gatsby.
• See the Gatsby site showcase.