Maybe you’ve already heard of (or even worked with!) KendoReact. It’s popped up in some of my day-to-day conversations, especially those about working with design systems and React. You could think of it as a component library like Bootstrap or Material Design, except the components in KendoReact are far more robust. These are interactive, state-driven components ready to start building full-blown UI’s right out of the gate (not to mention, if you want to use Bootstrap as the theme, you absolutely can).
Whenever you’re thinking about using a UI library, you need to think about the styling capabilities. Are you able to really express your brand with these? Were they meant to be styled? What is the styling experience going to be like?
Fortunately, KendoReact really makes styling a first-class citizen of the entire UI library.
KendoReact is a collection of UI components for building sites. It’s a pretty massive one. Over 80 by my count, and that doesn’t include the child components of heavy lifters like the <Grid /> family.
Here’s one, the <DropDownList />, and just using the default theme (even that is optional):
If I want to style this, I don’t need any special proprietary skills, I can just use CSS. Here’s me forcing a whole new look onto it with different colors and fonts, with just some simple CSS:
But hey, maybe you want to do something a bit more systematized than cowboying some random override CSS. I don’t blame you. Good news: KendoReact themes are Sass-powered. So you can control a lot of the colorization and styling just by changing a few Sass variables.
They have a whole theme builder you can use right on their site that spits out exactly what you need. Say you want to start from their base theme and go from there, select the Default theme:
Then you can play with all the colors in the UI to your liking. Here’s me poking at a theme with some CSS-Tricks colors.
I can download that from the site which will give me the variables as a SCSS file that I can apply before the default theme in my build (there is a great tutorial covering how to do that over on the Telerik blog). Plus, it gives me the whole dang CSS file of the theme if I want to use it that way, which is simple and quick. Here’s me using their conversational chat widget with that theme:
Again, I can start with Bootstrap, I can start with Material, I can start with their default theme, or I can start from scratch. Styling is totally up to me. Each theme has its perks and, as you might expect, are super flexible as far as configuring colors, fonts, and other design elements.
If you really get into this, of course you’ll be consulting their docs and finding your way around there (it’s nice to know they have really comprehensive docs). It’s all pretty straightforward though, you’ll do great! If you need to get going building out a state-driven interactive interface quickly without sacrificing any customizability or power, you’ll find KendoReact is your friend.
