Hi everyone!
We at Akveo were always obsessed with making a customizable UI. Since our very first product, Blur Admin, we tried to create an approach that would allow developers to adjust the visual appearance of the whole interface by just changing several properties. Later on, this evolved in several quite interesting concepts, as a result, we changed our vision a lot. Right now we're searching a way to simplify front end development and provide businesses and developers with powerful tools, approaches, and processes.
During the previous couple of weeks we were launching a couple of new products and updates of existing products:
- UI Bakery alpha
- React Native UI Kitten 4.0
- Nebular 4.0
Today we proud to announce the result of the years of internal R&D and best minds at Akveo bringing their ideas together - Eva Design System.
Eva Design System
Eva Design System is a root of all UI products we're building at Akveo right now. It serves us a single design source of truth for all of our frameworks like Nebular and UI Kitten, SaaS products like UI Bakery. Moreover, we use customized versions of it on the project we build for our clients.
The main idea behind Eva is customization. We have a pretty strong belief, that today UI developers spend too much time on the tasks that can be automated. Also, we believe that the code reusability is really low at this point and a lot of double-, triple- work is being made in the front end engineering area. Think about how many open source component libraries there are right now. It is quite a lot of them, right? But, think about how many unpublished proprietary libraries there is. We believe it's many times more of them. Billions of dollars are being spent by lots of companies on the development of buttons, inputs, calendars and later on their maintenance.
Our company was always dreaming of breaking this vicious circle, this is why we came up with the idea of Eva. Despite there's already quite a few design systems, Eva has one large competitive advantage: it was made with the idea of incremental customization in mind. This means that the same design resources and code frameworks can look and behave differently based on the settings provided as their configuration. This provides a way of manual and automatic UI customization based on the style guide of each company or product. In other words, you can get your branded design style guide and code frameworks without significant investments. Thus your designers and developers can focus on what your business needs instead of infrastructural work.
Nebular 4
Nebular 4 is Angular implementation of Eva design system. With the help of it, you can create enterprise-grade web apps. Nebular received a huge update that made him more powerful, performant and structural. Here are some insights about that:
- New convenient and flexible Theming system;
- Custom CSS properties support in theming;
- Unified component interfaces (@Input's and @Output's);
- New Dark theme;
- Support of SVG Eva Icons;
- Fixes and improvements;
For more information, please refer to the Nebular homepage.
UI Kitten 4
UI kitten is a framework on top of React Native that can help you build mobile apps for iOS and Android. It has also received a huge update and is based on Eva Design system now. The core new features are:
- Brand new Kitten Tricks app with completely new 40+ screens that can be taken straight to development;
- New Modern Dark theme;
- Improved theming system;
- Fixes and improvements;
For more information, please refer to the UI Kitten homepage.
UI Bakery
UI Bakery provides a way for technical and non-technical people to create UI using a convenient drag-and-drop builder and integrate it with the backend. It is also based on Eva design system, this is why it automatically receives all Eva cool features like branding, ease of white-labeling, etc. For now, the code generated in UI Bakery can be only downloaded as a structured Angular project, but soon it shall be possible to connect it to the backend API and host it in the cloud with one-click deployment.
For more information check out the video or visit
UI Bakery homepage.
Final words
It was quite a long journey for us and today is an important milestone, but we already look to set some new goals. I'm really happy and thankful to our team, who were working really hard to let us be where we are now. Guys, you are exceptional! A special thank you goes to the community, the people who were standing back-to-back and supporting us since the foundation of this company. We are always trying to bring you even more powerful tools and technologies.
Now, we will continue our long journey to simplify the lives of developers and bring more value to businesses. Stay tuned!
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