Status
Report

Howdy friends,

First off, a quick editorial note that I’ll be moving my Status Reports to the end of the month. Without further ado, let's get started!

Responsive Styling Update

This was a monster of an update and ended up being more technically challenging than we originally anticipated. True to form however, our intrepid developers pushed through these obstacles and have put something together that is a healthy balance of power and approachability — all native without the need for third party plugins or tooling.

As a quick recap, here are the Responsive Styling highlights.

• Designed mobile first.
• You’ll be able to change styling values for colors, typography, font sizes, spacing, and more at different screen sizes.
• The live preview area will allow dragging to resize. It can be scaled down to simulate what a design will look like on larger screens or scaled up to see details up close.
• You’ll be able to use dynamic content in the style controls allowing you to do things like set colors from Looper data.
• A built-in ruler and other guiding tools will help with your configurations.

Off the back of some beta feedback, we’re revisiting the core experience of changing a value at other breakpoints to allow for a way to change values in multiple places at once. We’re working through some iterations of that idea at the moment.

Once that is in, there are a few remaining items we need to complete before we’ll be ready for the official release.

• Dynamic Content compatibility with the new options.
• Retooling the Inspector based on customer feedback above.
• Final performance audit once everything is in place.

Cornerstone

Last month I mentioned some naming changes with respect to our family of builders. We have those changes ready to go for this update.

Our broader goal is to more accurately leverage Cornerstone as the name for our builders, and we have a more detailed writeup on this over at Facebook.

What’s Next

We had originally planned to do a couple of smaller cycles immediately after Responsive Styling that would include a couple of new Elements and a few other odds and ends. Immediately after that we were going to tackle another major update, our Theme Options reboot.

As we neared completion of Responsive Styling, we saw a lot of value in going right into Theme Options. There is some momentum we’ll have coming off the back of this cycle that will help with what project, so we have made the decision to move it up next.

What this means is that we will be able to get virtually all of the big technical items in sooner rather than later, and this will help on several fronts.

• Like a bow, the new Theme Options will tie together several of the bigger features we’ve been working towards over the past 18-24 months.
• We’ll be able to redefine our powerful Stack concept in a way we know you are going to love. Did someone say a blank Stack?
• There will be an improved onboarding experience.

For now, our primary focus is to complete Responsive Styling so we can get it into your hands. We don’t have an exact date for the official release, but it will certainly be in July (shooting for the middle of the month if not sooner). Stay tuned to Facebook and Twitter for the latest.

We’re also continuing with our Design Cloud initiative by releasing one new premium asset each week. Whether it’s a quick start for a design idea, prototyping something for a client, or deconstructing how various Cornerstone features work — these assets can be used in many different ways, and we’re excited to see the library continue to grow. Even better, they automatically show up in your Design Cloud library. No update needed!

Happy Summer,
Kyle