OrigamiFrontend Components & Services

Origami Newsletter, December 2020#

Posted on by chee.
Tagged with Newsletter

TL;DR: This issue features a new vision statement for Origami, an end-of-year clean up, and a plan for the next one.

Top things

Some of the bigger Origami news from the last month:

Mission and Vision Statements

Looking back over the 7 years of the team and project, we wrote a new mission statement for Origami.

We’ve posted them on the website here: https://origami.ft.com/documentation/principles/vision-and-mission/

Mission

Unifying and documenting the style and experience across the digital products of every FT brand, leveraging the web platform to provide an implementation of the brand guidelines.

We want to ensure our mission statement expresses that Origami is for every person and every product in the whole FT Group.

Vision

Every designer and developer in the FT knows how to use Origami, feels they have the agency to contribute to Origami and that they are an owner of Origami.

Origami is the gold standard of design systems and every FT designer and developer’s favourite way to create digital products.

In Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Death says “HUMANS NEED FANTASY IN ORDER TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE”. At the Strata Data Conference in 2019, Cait O’Riordan said it’s important to find your North Star.

A vision statement is like that. It’s where we want to be, it helps guide our choices so that one day it might be where we are.

Right now our focus is on making Origami feel like a project owned by everyone, something everyone wants to use.

We’re still some ways off, but we’re looking forward.

An end-of-year clean up

This month we closed around 700 issues on Origami projects on GitHub. It’s the first time we’ve had fewer than 300 things on our team todo list. We’ll continue to reduce that number, making it easier to plan our time.

🧹

We have also archived the project o-gallery, which was no longer in use and had not received updates in some time. We hope to replace it with a new carousel component in the coming year.

A plan for the year ahead

Work continues on the proposal to modernise Origami by dropping support for bower and shipping our components only via npm.

Our current roadmap has us deprecating our bower components at the end of Q2, and putting them in maintenance mode for a year.

Special thanks

Thank-you everyone for helping each other make it through this year.

Happy new year.

Broader update

A digest of other things that have happened this month: