Fragments

An open-source component library and token set, built by shipping ninety-nine interface studies in a year.

Year: 2024
Location: Johannesburg
Duration: 12 months, ongoing

Client: Self-initiated
Role: Concept, Design, Front-end
Discipline: UI/UX
Delivered: 2024 · 12 months, ongoing

The problem

What we were actually solving

Client work is always shaped by someone else's constraints. Fragments was built to test what happens when the only constraint is one you set yourself and refuse to break: a fixed set of primitives, one grid, one type scale, ninety-nine published interface studies.

The approach

Wall of framed graphic prints above a bright orange chair

How the work was made

The system is deliberately narrow. Six primitives, a five-column grid, three colours and a single type scale. Nothing else was permitted for the entire year, which forced solutions into composition rather than into new components.

Each study was built in a single sitting, dated, numbered and deployed the same day. No revisiting, no polishing a week later. The discipline mattered more than any individual result.

The last twenty studies introduced density and overlap, which broke the flatness of the earlier work without breaking the rules. That accident became the layout logic now sitting under two client design systems.

The outcome

The library has 99 published studies, is used in two commercial products, and has been forked more than four hundred times.

Interface studies published across twelve months: 99Interface studies published across twelve months
Primitives in the entire component vocabulary: 6Primitives in the entire component vocabulary
Forks of the open-source repository: 410Forks of the open-source repository
Commercial design systems built on top of it: 2Commercial design systems built on top of it