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Introduction

Spectre.css is a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework for faster and extensible development.

Spectre provides basic styles for typography and elements, flexbox based responsive layout system, CSS components and utilities with best practice coding and consistent design language.

Installation

There are 5 ways to get started with Spectre CSS framework in your projects. You can either install manually, from CDN or use package managers.

Install manually

Download the compiled and minified Spectre CSS file (core ~10KB min+gzip):

Download Spectre.css

Include spectre.css located in /docs/dist in your website or Web app <head>. Also, you can add spectre-icons.css and spectre-exp.css accordingly.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="spectre.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="spectre-exp.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="spectre-icons.min.css">

Install from CDN

Alternatively, you can use the unpkg or cdnjs CDN to load compiled Spectre.css.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/spectre.css/dist/spectre.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/spectre.css/dist/spectre-exp.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/spectre.css/dist/spectre-icons.min.css">

Install with NPM

$npm install spectre.css --save

Install with Yarn

$yarn add spectre.css

Install with Bower

$bower install spectre.css --save

Custom version

You can customize your version of Spectre.css by editing SASS files in /src directory or removing unneeded components from .scss source files.

SASS Source Code

If you are looking for LESS version of Spectre.css, please switch to LESS branch.

LESS Branch

Compiling CSS

Spectre uses Gulp for compiling CSS. Firstly you need to install NPM, which is used to manage Gulp and other dependencies.

Then, you can build the CSS file from the command line:

  1. Navigate to the root directory of Spectre.
  2. Run npm install. NPM will install all dev dependencies as listed in package.json.
  3. When completed, run gulp build task to compile SASS to CSS and minify files.
  4. You can find compiled CSS files in /dist directory.

All available Gulp tasks:

  • gulp build - compile SASS to CSS and minify files (default)
  • gulp docs - compile Docs related files
  • gulp watch - watch file changes and re-compile CSS files

Importing SASS

It is recommended to custom Spectre by importing SASS source files to your projects. In this way, you can keep Spectre up to date without conflicts, since Spectre code and your custom code are separate.

  • First, create your own project and install Spectre via NPM or other package managers.
  • Then create your project-name.scss file in the root folder. You can use project-name.scss to define your variables.
  • Compile the SASS file to CSS to get the custom version of Spectre.
// Example of project-name.scss
// Define variables to override default ones
$primary-color: #2e5bec;
$dark-color: #3e396b;

// Import full Spectre source code
@import "node_modules/spectre.css/src/spectre";

Alternatively, you can create custom _variables.scss and import it to project-name.scss. 

// Example of project-name.scss
@import "variables";

// Import only the needed components
@import "node_modules/spectre.css/src/buttons";
@import "node_modules/spectre.css/src/forms";

Folder Structure

spectre/
├── dist/                           // Build folder (Git ignored)
│   ├── spectre-exp.css
│   ├── spectre-exp.min.css
│   ├── spectre-icons.css
│   ├── spectre-icons.min.css
│   ├── spectre.css
│   └── spectre.min.css
│
├── docs/
│   ├── dist/                       // Pre-built CSS folder
│   │   ├── spectre-exp.css
│   │   ├── spectre-exp.min.css
│   │   ├── spectre-icons.css
│   │   ├── spectre-icons.min.css
│   │   ├── spectre.css
│   │   └── spectre.min.css
|   ├── css/                        // Docs CSS file
│   │   └── docs.css
|   ├── src/
│   │   └── docs.scss
│   ├── examples/                   // Example tempalte
│   │   └── starter.html
│   ├── ../
│   ├── index.html
│   └── ...
│
├── src/                            // Source SASS files
│   ├── spectre.scss
│   ├── spectre-icons.scss
│   ├── spectre-exp.scss
│   ├── _mixins.scss
│   ├── _variables.scss
│   └── ...
│
├── gulpfile.js
├── package.json
└── ...

Variables

Spectre.css is designed with consistent design language. You can use your own variables to create your new or match existing design. All variables in _variables.scss include !default flag. You can redefine the variables to override the values.

Colors
#5755d9
Primary
#f1f1fc
Secondary
#32b643
Success
#ffb700
Warning
#e85600
Error
#454d5d
Dark
#727e96
Gray dark
#acb3c2
Gray
#e7e9ed
Gray light
#f0f1f4
Border
#f8f9fa
Background
#fff
Light
Buttons

There are 2 button variant mixins in _mixins.scss to generate different color variants.

  • @mixin button-variant($color: $primary-color);
  • @mixin button-outline-variant($color: $primary-color);
<!-- filled button with the success color -->
.btn-success {
  @include button-variant($success-color);
}

<!-- outlined button with the success color -->
.btn-outline-success {
  @include button-outline-variant($success-color);
}
Sizes

The default REM (root em) size in Spectre.css is 20px.

Please note in the Chinese/Japanese/Korean version, Chrome uses 12px as default minimum font size. That is why Spectre sets rem default html font size to 20px, which is relatively easy to calculate.

Spectre uses 4px as the unit size. Sizes of components are based on the unit size.

Custom prefix

There is also a way to add custom prefix to all CSS classes. You can use gulp-css-prefix plugin and add a new Gulp task to enable it. 

$ npm install gulp-css-prefix

To add spectre- to all classes, you can add the Gulp task to gulpfile.js file.

var cssPrefix = require('gulp-css-prefix');
  
gulp.task('prefix', function() {
  gulp.src('./dist/*.css')
      .pipe(cssPrefix('spectre-'))
      .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
});

After you compile your version of Spectre in the /dist, run gulp prefix in the directory of Spectre.

Accessibility coming soon

Browser support

Spectre uses Autoprefixer to make most styles compatible with earlier browsers and Normalize.css for CSS resets. Spectre is designed for modern browsers. For best compatibility, these browsers are recommended:

  • Chrome LAST 4
  • Microsoft Edge LAST 4
  • Firefox Extended Support Release
  • Safari LAST 4
  • Opera LAST 4
  • Internet Explorer 10+

What's new

September 2017

  • Off-canvas: navigation layout that the sidebar can slide in and out of the viewport NEW

August 2017

April 2017

March 2017

  • Icons: single-element, responsive and pure CSS icons
  • Popovers: small overlay content containers
  • Panels: flexible view container layout with auto-expand content section
  • Carousels: slideshows for cycling images
  • Calendars: date or date range picker and events display

February 2017

  • New Documents experience
  • Bars: represent the progress of a task or the value within the known range
  • Steps: progress indicators of a sequence of task steps
  • Tiles: repeatable or embeddable information blocks
  • Experimentals: experimental elements and features
  • Meters, Parallax, Progress and Sliders

March 2016

  • Initial commit

Releases