Build consistent, themeable React apps based on constraint-based design principles | Built with Emotion + Styled System + MDX + Typography.js
Built for white-labels, themes, and other applications where customizing colors, typography, and layout are treated as first-class citizens and based on the System UI Theme Specification, Theme UI is intended to work in a variety of applications, libraries, and other UI components. Colors, typography, and layout styles derived from customizable scales and design tokens, help you build UI rooted in constraint-based design principles.
- Styled system without creating components
- First class support for the
css
prop - Style MDX content with a simple, expressive API
- Use Typography.js themes
- Works with virtually any UI component library
- Works with existing Styled System components
- Quick mobile-first responsive styles
- Built-in support for dark modes
- Primitive page layout components
- Plugin for use in Gatsby sites and themes
- Define your own design tokens
- Built with the System UI Theme Specification for interoperability
- Keep styles isolated with Emotion
npm i theme-ui @emotion/core @mdx-js/react
Any styles in your app can reference values from the global theme
object.
To provide the theme in context,
wrap your application with the ThemeProvider
component and pass in a custom theme
object.
// basic usage
import React from 'react'
import { ThemeProvider } from 'theme-ui'
import theme from './theme'
export default props => (
<ThemeProvider theme={theme}>{props.children}</ThemeProvider>
)
The theme
object follows the System UI Theme Specification,
which lets you define custom color palettes, typographic scales, fonts, and more.
Read more about theming.
// example theme.js
export default {
fonts: {
body: 'system-ui, sans-serif',
heading: '"Avenir Next", sans-serif',
monospace: 'Menlo, monospace',
},
colors: {
text: '#000',
background: '#fff',
primary: '#33e',
},
}
The sx
prop works similarly to Emotion's css
prop, accepting style objects to add CSS directly to an element in JSX, but includes extra theme-aware functionality.
Using the sx
prop for styles means that certain properties can reference values defined in your theme
object.
This is intended to make keeping styles consistent throughout your app the easy thing to do.
The sx
prop only works in modules that have defined a custom pragma at the top of the file, which replaces the default React.createElement
function.
This means you can control which modules in your application opt into this feature without the need for a Babel plugin or additional configuration.
/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx } from 'theme-ui'
export default props => (
<div
sx={{
fontWeight: 'bold',
fontSize: 4, // picks up value from `theme.fontSizes[4]`
color: 'primary', // picks up value from `theme.colors.primary`
}}>
Hello
</div>
)
Under the hood, this uses the @styled-system/css
utility and Emotion's custom JSX pragma implementation.
Read more about how the custom pragma works.
The sx
prop also supports using arrays as values to change properties responsively with a mobile-first approach.
This API originated in Styled System and is intended as a terser syntax for applying responsive styles across a singular dimension.
/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx } from 'theme-ui'
export default props => (
<div
sx={{
// applies width 100% to all viewport widths,
// width 50% above the first breakpoint,
// and 25% above the next breakpoint
width: ['100%', '50%', '25%'],
}}
/>
)
MIT License