Introducing the Brightspot Design System

When you're looking for a new CMS, you want one that lets you present your content how you want. You start out hopeful that you'll find exactly what your business needs—or if not, that you'll be able to customize the look and feel so that it becomes what your business needs. And then it hits you that you'll have to settle for something less because you fit into one of the following three categories:

No code

You don't have developer resources, so you'll need something that can be configured totally editorially, without code—except even CMSes that offer hundreds of theme options don't give you the perfect fit you need.

Low code

You have developers, but not the time or resourcing to build templates, styles, behaviors and interactions from scratch—you just want to do some low-code tweaks, which not every CMS offers.

Fully custom

You have developers and you want to fully customize your digital experience, but you can't lock them into continuously iterating on it due to other high-priority activities

What path do you follow?

Or, even better, is there the option to mix and match no-code, low-code and fully custom methods?

With the Brightspot Design System, there is.

What is the Brightspot Design System?

The Brightspot Design System provides a robust foundation for designing user-facing digital experiences with pre-built templates, styles, behaviors and interactions that can be modified, extended and customized as much or as little as you want. That means that no matter what technical resources you have at your disposal, you can do one—or many—of the following:

• Tweak something editorially without having to get your developers involved or jump up a pricing tier
• Add a bit of CSS here and there without having to do full-blown development
• Fully customize the look and feel from scratch, and then let others handle iterations editorially or with low-code changes

How the Brightspot Design System works

Let's get more concrete. Just what are you modifying, extending or fully customizing with the Brightspot Design System's library of options?

10+ page types

These include core pages like homepage, sections, tags and more.

20+ asset page types

These cover asset-level content like articles, blog posts and newsletters.

25+ module types

These include modules like promos, lists and navigation items.

CSS

Used by 95%+ of all websites on the internet to control the design, style and layout of web pages.

Javascript

One of the internet's core technologies, JavaScript is a scripting language used to make content interactive.

Handlebars

Handlebars (HBS) is a powerful, widely used templating engine for creating reusable web page templates.

Brightspot comes with pre-built and fully modeled out content types and templates based on common use cases across a variety of markets. Better yet, with these you don't have to do any data modeling yourself (you can if you want, though, with editorial content types, which allow you to create your own, net new content types directly in the Brightspot admin—but that's a topic for another day).

Of course, we're still not done—each of those content types has dozens of styling options so that you can settle on a look and feel that fits your organization instead of having to compromise using pre-built themes. Even if each only had two styling options, that's still 2,000+ combinations, available to you that can tweaked and styled with low-code efforts and zero development dependencies. Go a step further, and every content type is fully customizable with Typescript. So with hundreds of thousands of options available to you, the Brightspot Design System really is your playground of possibilities.

Let's visualize what this might look like. With the Brightspot Design System, your site could look like any of the following three examples:

Approach 1 -
No Code

Choose layouts, colors, styles, fonts and other Design attributes directly within the Brightspot CMS, no designers or code required at all. Create and launch new content in minutes or hours, not weeks or months.

Approach 2 -
Low Code

Extend Brightspot’s Design System with industry-standard, low code CSS, JavaScript, and Handlebars templates to create the specific Presentation Layer you want, without the time and expense you don’t.

Approach 3 -
Fully Custom

Utilize a design team (yours, ours, or anyone else’s) and a create a professional software project for a fully custom presentation layer with no limitations, at a fraction of the time and expense of other platforms.

Or it could look fundamentally different than the mere three examples above (all of which are based on customer designs who, in fact, used the Brightspot Design System to make their sites look so nice).

Maybe it's time for you to explore the Brightspot Design System for yourself. Go right ahead—we've put together wireframe mocks of everything we bring to the table. It's a massive net that is designed to catch you where you are, but a flexible one that you can stretch however you want so that it fits your exact digital needs best.

This is how, by the way, we help organizations launch with extreme speed. Using our pre-built content types and amenable styling options and approaches, you don't begin from scratch—you begin 90% of the way done.

So no matter what resources you have available, you can use the Brightspot Design System to build engaging digital experiences that perfectly fit your brand—and that can be easily changed over time, when the need is there.