Understand the core philosophies and technical standards that ensure the long-term stability of your design system. This guide explains our approach to semantic versioning, breaking changes, and support levels for core and extended primitives. Manage your system's evolution with a clear and predictable roadmap.
Versioning ensures that the evolution of your design system remains intentional and manageable for every team in your organization. Handoff supports version-aware development across all design tokens, components, APIs, and CLI tooling.
As your design system evolves, new primitives may be introduced and existing elements may be refined or deprecated. It is critical that all consumers are aware of the system version they are integrating into their projects to ensure perfect alignment between design and code.
To help you manage risk, we categorize system elements into three distinct stability levels:
Any breaking change in the Handoff ecosystem will be explicitly documented and clearly versioned in accordance with semantic versioning standards. We provide migration guidance for every major update to help your team transition smoothly to the latest architecture.
Sustainable design systems require clear architectural boundaries and a transparent change history. By following our intentional versioning and deprecation cycles, you can grow your system with confidence while ensuring long-term stability and predictability for every downstream consumer.