Time to work on a design system on top of IPS?

The more I build, the more I see the need for a design system for JWSE. Not to replace the IPS underlying styles, but to extend on top of them. I have quite a lot of duplicated code right now from trying things out, and it makes sense to try to consolidate things into a more focused design experience.

As with all sites where you explore and tinker around with things there will be a need to clean things up and optimize from time to time. I already started to explore a design system when I started this site, but I find it a bit hard to switch over to a different system just to document things.

The question is if the problem is that working with IPS just fall outside of regular development processes since I do not really use an IDE or code repositories. Maybe I just have not found the right tool for me for this purpose. I am not sure, but I will explore it a bit in 2021. There is always the option to simply build a database for it right in IPS, which is an idea I am not terribly against to be honest.

For the CSS I will start breaking things down in 2021 and define some standard classes that I use most. Tabs and forms for example makes sense to standardize since I use them quite a lot. I have already setup variables for colors and I will extend that a bit where it makes sense for a more functional CSS style.

I do not plan to have a fully fledged Tailwind or Bootstrap setup, but at least some structure that makes it faster to add components that I use often. It also makes sense to define certain design elements such as colors, fonts and border radius for example. It also makes sense to have a standard definition of things like flexbox and a library of components.

In the best of worlds this would allow me to simply drop in a custom CSS file in a new theme, change a few colors and then everything will work out of the box.

It will be a fun project to play around with I think.