info icon

With two pages comprised entirely of Carbon components, let’s revisit the landing page and build a couple components of our own by using Carbon pictograms and tokens.

Carbon provides a solid foundation for building web applications through its color palette, layout, spacing, type, as well as common building blocks in the form of components. So far, we've only used Carbon components to build out two pages.

Next, we're going to use Carbon assets to build application-specific components. We'll do so by including accessibility and responsive considerations all throughout.

Here's a preview of what you'll build.

This tutorial has an accompanying GitHub repository called carbon-tutorial-nextjs that we’ll use as a starting point for each step. If you haven’t forked and cloned that repository yet, and haven’t added the upstream remote, go ahead and do so by following the step 1 instructions.

With your repository all set up, let’s check out the branch for this tutorial step’s starting point.

Note: This builds on top of step 3, but be sure to check out the upstream step 4 branch because it includes the static assets required to get through this step.

Install the app’s dependencies (in case you’re starting fresh in your current directory and not continuing from the previous step):

Then, start the app:

You should see something similar to where the previous step left off.

Here’s what we’re building – an informational section that has a heading and three subheadings. Each subheading has accompanying copy and a pictogram. We’ll assume that this informational section is used elsewhere on the site, meaning it’s a great opportunity to build it as a reusable component. As for naming, we’ll call it an InfoSection with three InfoCards as children.

Info section layout

First we need files for the components, so create an Info folder in src/components. Even though we’re building multiple components, their names all start with Info, so it makes sense to have them share one folder in components. Create these files:

Import _info.scss in app.scss after all of the tutorial-header.scss import.

Let’s create the parent component that includes the “The Principles” heading. That markup currently looks like this in LandingPage:

We want to do a few things when abstracting it to a component. First, we only want this component’s class names; we don’t want to include landing-page__r3 as that’s specific to the landing page. For that we’ll use React props so we can pass in and use props.className.

We’ll also:

Add component class names like info-section, info-card, and info-section__heading
We will be using the Grid and Column components
Replace The Principles with {props.heading}
Replace columns 2 - 4 with {props.children}

Using props we can render any heading and any number of children components (InfoCard that we’ll build soon.)

At this point let’s import our needed styles and add styling for the new class names that we just added.

Next up we’re going to build a component for columns 2 - 4, which currently looks like <Column md={4} lg={4}>Carbon is Open</Column>. At the bottom of Info.js, add:

Note: Make sure to export the two components!

In doing so, we:

Added info-card classes
Used props to render the heading, body copy, and icon
Set columns to match the grid

Nothing is styled yet, but with our components built let’s put them to use. In LandingPage, import the components towards the top of the file.

Next, we will install the pictograms we will use in the header.

While we’re at the top of LandingPage, import the pictograms that we’ll need as well.

With everything imported, replace the current:

With the new components:

Note: Now is a good time to resize your browser from phone to large viewport widths to see how the responsive grid is working before we add further styling.

Here’s our design showing the spacing tokens that we need to add. We also need to set type style and borders.

Starting with layout, import the following carbon styles to src/components/Info/_info.scss. Make sure to import the needed carbon styles.

We will then add the following styles to the same file to style our info cards.

Once you save, go ahead and resize your browser to see the responsive layout at the different breakpoints. Make sure to review these color and spacing tokens. There are also a few breakpoint mixins that may be new to you.

Our InfoCard headings look to be too small. We need to increase their font sizes according to the design spec. Lets update the heading with the following type style:

Also, the design has the last word in each subheading as bold. To accomplish that, add this helper function after the import in Info.js.

Then, update InfoCard to use createArrayFromPhrase.

Finally, add the declaration block in _info.scss to set InfoCard body copy styles and to bottom-align the pictograms.

We’ve added new markup and styles, so it’s a good practice to check Equal Access Checker and make sure our rendered markup is on the right track for accessibility.

With the browser extension installed, Chrome in this example, open Dev Tools and run Accessibility Assessment.

We’re going to submit a pull request to verify completion of this tutorial step.

Run the CI check to make sure we’re all set to submit a pull request.

Note: Having issues running the CI check? Step 1 has troubleshooting notes that may help.

Before we can create a pull request, format your code, then stage and commit all of your changes:

Then, push to your repository:

Note: Having issues pushing your changes? Step 1 has troubleshooting notes that may help.

Finally, visit carbon-tutorial-nextjs to “Compare & pull request”. In doing so, make sure that you are comparing to v11-next-step-4 into base: v11-next-step-4.

Note: Expect your tutorial step PRs to be reviewed by the Carbon team but not merged. We’ll close your PR so we can keep the repository’s remote branches pristine and ready for the next person!

Note: If your PR fails the CircleCI test with the error Can't make a request in offline mode, try running the following command: rm -rf .yarn-offline-mirror node_modules && yarn cache clean && yarn install. Add and commit the changes once this completes, and try pushing again.

React tutorial

Overview

Fork, clone and branch

Branch

Build and start app

Review design

Create components

Add files

InfoSection component

InfoCard component

Use components

Add styling

Layout

Type

Check accessibility

Submit pull request

Continuous integration (CI) check

Git commit and push

Pull request (PR)