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Discussion on: We're the core maintainers of Storybook, Ask Us Anything!

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Ben Halpern

What’s it like developing an open source project with such a UI component itself, must have challenges that are different from the typical more headless tool.

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shilman

Fortunately Storybook is about making UI development easier, so we have Storybooks for our internal components and get a lot of testing "for free" using this setup. We should document our setup better to help other OSS projects move faster and with more confidence!

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Ben Halpern

Storybookception

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Norbert de Langen

Yes it's a challenge in the design-department for sure.

Storybook the app can only look boring and subtle, because the more 'distinct designed' it is, the harder it will be to combine it with whatever components storybook is supposed to show off.

And ultimately those components are the real importance to users, so storybook needs to 'lay low'.

We're looking at improving it though and also allow more customisation. I recently implemented theming, so you can now change the colours to what you want.
More customisation is coming though, soon!

For an OSS it's actually surprisingly hard to find help in the design department. Developers know opensource and so it's much easier to get software development help, then design help.

And I (personally) can use all the design help I can get.

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Ben Halpern

Yeah, I agree on those things. I asked the question because I feel like we're going to be embarking on this sort of thing in the not-to-distant future

I feel like customization winds up being more important in OSS because there's a shared sense of ownership, and the bugs introduced by customization hiccups are easier to deal with via the community. But definitely agree, that design help can be the hardest to come by. I find people (politely) don't want to intrude in this arena sometimes, or don't know if they have permission.

Definitely following the project for cues. It's very clear that design is part of what you do well though!!