su-sws/decanter

Stanford's Design System Made With Tailwind

Maintainers

Package info

github.com/SU-SWS/decanter

Language:HTML

pkg:composer/su-sws/decanter

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Statistics

Installs: 65

Dependents: 0

Suggesters: 0

Stars: 42

Open Issues: 3


README

Version: 8 (beta)

Changelog: CHANGELOG.md · Upgrading from v7? See UPGRADE.md

Description

Decanter is a web design and development system for Stanford University. Version 8 is a CSS-first preset for Tailwind CSS v4: you import plain CSS and get the Stanford Identity color palette, typography scales, spacing system, components, utilities, and custom variants on top of core Tailwind.

Demo

The test page in this repository (static/index.html) demonstrates the custom Decanter features. Run it locally with npm install && npm run dev.

Documentation

Installation

You first need to install Tailwind CSS v4. See the Tailwind CSS website for your framework's recommended installation method.

For example, for use with Next.js v16, install Tailwind CSS v4, @tailwindcss/postcss and Decanter (beta release) as dev dependencies:

npm install -D tailwindcss @tailwindcss/postcss decanter@beta

In your project's main CSS file:

@import 'decanter';
@import 'decanter/forms'; /* optional — only if your site has forms elements that use the Decanter styles */

There is no need to add a separate @import 'tailwindcss', or your output will contain the preflight reset twice. Build with any Tailwind v4 integration (@tailwindcss/cli, @tailwindcss/vite, or @tailwindcss/postcss).

Entry points

Import Contents
decanter Everything: theme, components, utilities, variants, full base styles
decanter/minimal Same, without element-level base opinions such as link colors
decanter/forms Opt-in form classes + the bundled @tailwindcss/forms reset (requires decanter or decanter/minimal)
decanter/colors Stanford color palette only — standalone, works on stock Tailwind
decanter/src/* Any individual source file, for à-la-carte composition

See Getting Started for details, including the 62.5% root font size convention (spacing and font-size class numbers read as pixels: p-16 = 16px, text-18 = 18px).

Fonts

Decanter provides font-family utilities (font-sans, font-serif, font-stanford) but does not bundle or load the font files — how fonts are loaded is framework-specific, so that's left to you. Load only the families you use; if one isn't loaded, its class falls back gracefully down the stack.

See Loading the fonts for which families and weights to load and copy-paste examples (<link>, @import, self-hosting, and framework tooling), plus the @font-face snippet for the Stanford wordmark font used by .logo.

Icons

Decanter does not include any icon assets. We recommend the heroicons package — Hero Icons are created by the Tailwind CSS team, open source, and usable as SVG or JSX.

Accessibility

WCAG Conformance 2.0 AA Badge

This project conforms to level AA WCAG 2.0 standards as required by the university's accessibility policy. For more information on the policy please visit: https://www.stanford.edu/accessibility.