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Emulsify design system: what’s great, what’s coming

2 Min. ReadDesign and UX

When a team focuses on building the best tools to make content development and wireframing more useful, they get a sense of accomplishment seeing people adopt and use those tools. The team behind Emulsify is no different. We strive to build something over 65,000 Drupal users find useful, and that makes us want to build more.

Emulsify is specifically designed to help reduce costly errors, keep Drupal projects functioning into the future, and to help your team scale their design goals. As we grow the abilities of this tool, we plan to focus on building a long lasting, durable piece that will be part of every Drupal user’s toolkit, from newly indoctrinated folks to power users.

When we designed Emulsify, our goal was to set up something Drupal users could take advantage of for fast prototyping, a method for getting a basic site up for potential users, at scale, without the hassle of building something that may not be useful. Any prototype built with Emulsify can go from proof of concept to large scale site construction easily.

Emulsify templates work to be a single, authoritative source to reuse components, saving valuable development time. Adhering to the concept of DRY, Don’t Repeat Yourself, there is a focus on streamlining the build process to ensure the best possible outcome.

The current version of Emulsify is a full Drupal 8 theme leveraging the Twig templating engine, which helps bring your prototype to life. For those people not yet using Drupal 8, we advise upgrading to take full advantage of what’s coming in the near future from the Drupal team.

Of course, Drupal isn’t the only upgradeable part of this ecosystem. We are proud of our team’s current work on Emulsify version 5! 

Emulsify 5 screenshot

With this latest version, we are  stepping beyond the world of pattern libraries into offering a full Design System. This will help  your organization by assuring your brand and look are consistent around the messaging your sites are looking to provide.

The Emulsify Design System leverages a new style guide built using GatsbyJS. Also, our team moved from Pattern Lab to Storybook for the pattern library in order to open the door to further functionality, all of which will help make Emulsify more useful to current users. With content management, like all development, it’s important to use a group of tools that best meet users’ needs — to reach this goal we gave our engineers the opportunity to look at other CMS solutions to see how best to perform the actions you expect from your systems. 

Emulsify’s latest version will be dropping soon, but there’s no need to wait. Add Emulsify to your Drupal installation today and make your work easier and more efficient, all while impressing your end users!

To find out more, check out our great introduction and tutorial videos on Emulsify and make sure to sign up for the Emulsify Newsletter for updates, feature announcements, and more from the team!