FAQs

Carbon is the open-source design system for all IBM software products. It is a series of individual styles, components, and guidelines used for creating unified product experiences.

Carbon has a core team of designers and front-end developers dedicated to developing and supporting the system. Our core team sits in the IBM Design Studio in Austin, Texas. There are also countless other designers and developers who contribute back to carbon-components and carbon-react.

Check out our contribution overview to learn all about the different ways to contribute. Thanks for the help!

Carbon components are supported in the following browsers:

There are four different implementations of the Carbon Design System. One is a vanilla JavaScript library; that’s written in ES6+, SCSS, and HTML and ships deliverables in vanilla JavaScript in ES5 as well as ES6, CSS, SCSS and HTML. Another is a React library that ships a React rewrite of the JavaScript, but uses the same CSS as the core library. There are also Angular and Vue libraries that use the same CSS.

First, make sure the problem is reproducible. Once confirmed, open an issue in the appropriate GitHub repo (see below). We will address the bug as soon as we can. If you have a fix for the bug, please feel free to submit a PR for it.

If you have a pressing bug or change it is best to make PR for the issue yourself. Our team works in sprints and will try to address your bug as soon as possible; sometimes within two or three days, but usually by the following sprint. Issues that are out of scope will be closed until they become a higher priority.

Typical responses to bug reports will include:

First, refer to the Carbon accessibility guidelines to confirm that the component fails accessibility standards. If confirmed, create a GitHub issue in the Components repo and describe the steps to reproduce the problem. If the core Carbon team confirms the problem, we will work to fix it as quickly as possible.

Every version of Carbon that is still supported is hosted at its own domain. You can find the old sites version here: V6, V7, V8, and V9.

Carbon v10.x

Carbon v9.x

The patterns and components that were in Experimental are now in the Community assets section. Community assets include work developed and maintained by the individuals and teams who use Carbon. You can help elevate these resources by contributing feedback, code, and design.

Note that some of the content in Community assets is hosted on internal IBM sites and is only accessible to IBMers.

Carbon charts are in development and classified as experimental. Check out the experimental charts repo to explore the work so far.

These charts will receive an updated color palette to match Carbon v10. Visual guidance and chart components are also in the works!

There are many ways to move content from a 12-column grid onto a 16-column grid. If keeping the number of columns unchanged is not important to you, see below examples.

If keeping the number of columns to three is essential, here are some other options.