import { Meta } from '@storybook/addon-docs';

<Meta title="About NorthStar V2" />

# About NorthStar v2

## NorthStar empowers you to rapidly prototype intuitive, meaningful and accessible user experiences at scale

NorthStar is an open source design system with reusable React components for rapidly prototyping intuitive, meaningful and accessible user experience. It simplifies your work and ensures consistent, predictable user experience at scale for your customers. With NorthStar, you can focus on innovation and do more with less.

Whether you are a developer or a designer, NorthStar will help you delight your customers from inception to prototype.

NorthStar v2 improves upon the previous version by leveraging [Cloudscape Design System](https://cloudscape.design/) and with updates to the existing components with new features that make the development experience even better.  

## Vision

To be ** the ** holistic design system for rapidly prototyping rich, engaging user experiences, and allow easy transition from prototyping to production. 

NorthStar v2 leverages the capabilities and maturity of the Cloudscape Design System, which is already used in production within the AWS Management Console. This means that you can bring the prototypes to production without redesigning the user experience and simply improving upon the existing work. 

## Benefits

1. Your customers are the primary beneficiary of NorthStar v2. A shared design language and standardized components with a common frame of reference for end users to understand the user experience. Users already familiar with CloudScape design system will find the user experience delivered by NorthStar v2 simple to understand, use and operate. Users who don’t know CloudScape will quickly pick up the interaction patterns and learn the user interface in no time.

2. NorthStar provides out-of-the-box support for accessibility, responsive design, and broad browser coverage. This significantly reduces the amount of effort for developers who can focus on features.

3. NorthStar ships with high-level components that simplify the development of common interaction flows for a variety of use cases.

## Tenets and key concepts

### 1. Convention over configuration. 

Eliminate the need for configuration, simplifying the developer experience, decreasing the time from design to implementation.

### 2. Be opinionated as it accelerates development

NorthStar v2 is a design system. It is prescriptive and should always care for the undifferentiated heavy lifting of CSS, layout and styling.

### 3. Eat our own dog food

We consume what we produce. NorthStar should remain self-documenting, always include a storybook and allow developers to experiment.

### 4. Growth through community

Actively encourage a broad open source community to accelerate the development of the system.

### 5. Be a playground for experimental UI components 

Inspire innovation through user experience design.

## The future of NorthStar

Looking to the future, NorthStar will continue to grow as a visual, design, and development system targeted at the delivery of intuitive, meaningful and accessible user experiences. We encourage you to contribute to the project. See our contribution guide [here](https://github.com/aws/aws-northstar/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).

## Cloudscape Design System and NorthStar

On July 19, 2022, AWS released [Cloudscape Design System](https://cloudscape.design/) as an open source design system. Cloudscape is a solution for building intuitive user experiences. It offers guidelines to create web applications, along with the design resources and front-end components to streamline implementation. 

NorthStar v2 is built on top of [Cloudscape Design System](https://cloudscape.design/) to enable developers to rapidly prototype user experiences and allow easy transition from prototyping to production.