Styling your application with design systems

Design systems help you introduce consistency to the applications that you build. By choosing to use a design system, you can scale your designs to maintain a unified presence across a number of platforms with less effort.

A design system is a library of patterns and rules that determine how an interface responds to user interaction. Design systems contain the best practice guidelines, operational assets, and UI components that are required to deliver the interface. For example, a design system might include a reusable table component that supports sorting, filtering, and grouping. You can source every table in your application from that component, which means that every table in the application can have the same basic architecture and rely on consistent rules to model user interactions.

Some organizations develop proprietary design systems to unify the presentation, behavior, and structural rules of their application interfaces. However, most businesses rely on the design system that is provided by Pega. Either approach helps improve consistency, and creates a system that is easier to upgrade and maintain.

Cosmos design system

Pega Platform uses the Pega Cosmos design system as its main product design resource. The system provides a consistent library of components that form the entire user experience for both customer-facing applications andPega Platform itself.

Cosmos relies fully on templates and prefabricated components for more efficient development and performance. In addition, a more modern design and increased focus on intuitiveness help save time on application updates and user training.

Cosmos supports a number of JavaScript libraries, including React UI, which is the framework on which Pega Platform bases its UI components. For more information, see Accelerate your workflow with Cosmos UI.

UI Kit

UI Kit is the classic set of product design resources that is aimed at improving consistency in business applications. As the original Pega Platform design solution, UI Kit speeds up maintenance and continued development of existing applications.