FAQs

Carbon is the open-source design system for all IBM software products. It is a series of individual styles, components, and guidelines used for creating unified product experiences.

To learn more about how we work check out What is Carbon.

Carbon has a core team of designers and front-end developers dedicated to developing and supporting the system. There are also countless other designers and developers who contribute back to carbon-react.

Check out our contribution get started page to learn all about the different ways to contribute. Thanks for the help!

First, make sure the problem is reproducible. Once confirmed, open an issue in the appropriate GitHub repo from the following list. We will address the bug as soon as we can. If you have a fix for the bug, please feel free to submit a PR for it.

For larger changes, please see our contribution get started page.

If you have a pressing bug or change it is best to make a PR for the issue yourself. Our team works in sprints and will try to address your bug as soon as possible; sometimes within two or three days, but usually by the following sprint. Issues that are out of scope will be closed until they become a higher priority.

Typical responses to bug reports will include:

First, refer to the Carbon accessibility guidelines to confirm that the component fails accessibility standards. If confirmed, create a GitHub issue in the Components repo and describe the steps to reproduce the problem. If the core Carbon team confirms the problem, we will work to fix it as quickly as possible.

Carbon components are supported in the following browsers:

For IBM teams, see browser support standards here.

Carbon is built React first, with official support for Web Components. There is community support for vanilla JS, Angular, Vue, and Svelte implementations. Check out Frameworks to learn more about what you need to get started with Carbon implementations.

The Carbon Native mobile Figma kit is available on the Other resources page.

Feature flags enable new behaviors and styling, allowing users to opt-in to new breaking changes while staying on the current major version. A list of components with available feature flags can be found on the Component Overview page under the Feature flags tab.

The team occasionally will author code, or accept contributions, that is considered experimental or unstable. The goal for this code is to ship it as unstable for sponsor groups to leverage. During this time, the team can get feedback around what is working and what does not work so that changes can be made before an official release. They are available on the storybook under the Experimental tab.

The patterns and components that were in Experimental are now in the Community assets section. Community assets include work developed and maintained by the individuals and teams who use Carbon. You can help elevate these resources by contributing feedback, code, and design.

Note that some of the content in Community assets is hosted on internal IBM sites and is only accessible to IBMers.

Carbon charts and their corresponding assets and documentation are now in the Data visualization section.

You can find earlier versions of Carbon documentation here: V6, V7, V8, V9, and V10.

Carbon contains a telemetry feature that collects usage information for IBM and Carbon Design System properties.

Carbon collects telemetry information to influence Carbon’s roadmap and prioritize bug fixes.

Data is only collected when Carbon packages are installed on a Continuous Integration (CI) server, when the installation is not part of a Pull Request (PR), and for Git repositories with the origin remotes:

As the information collected is not anonymous, telemetry data collection is limited to IBM GitHub Enterprise repositories, as well as open source repositories in the IBM and Carbon Design System GitHub organizations.

The following is collected through a postinstall script:

Participation in Carbon’s telemetry is optional. To opt-out, set the environment variable

CARBON_TELEMETRY_DISABLED

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