News from the Front

The look of Aragon has been updated to a cohesive whole

Hi! I am Pierre, Interface Developer at Aragon 👋

It's been already three months since I joined the Aragon team, and this article will provide a quick update about the progress that has been made recently on the front-end side of things.

Fresh Start

Starting with the next version, v0.5 — The Refactor Release, Aragon will feature an entirely revamped interface. The decision to redesign the DApp was simple. There was a need to align the app and it's updated graphical identity, design principles and use cases to the origin of the project. Exciting!

As you can imagine, this new interface will be faster, cleaner, prettier, more consistent and have improved modularity. And the way we want to achieve this is by releasing a high quality user interface toolkit. This is a toolkit that we use across all our projects to provide a unified experience. It's designed so any third party can easily build user experiences around and atop of Aragon.

A unified Aragon experience

Before going further, let's see what are the different interfaces being built for Aragon. First, there is the new website.

Then we have the Aragon Core DApp, which actually consists of several projects.

The main part (blue area in the illustration below) is the Aragon Core itself, also called the wrapper. It allows to load Aragon apps, display notifications, manage the settings among other things, like the interface to sign transactions. It could be compared to a web browser.

The other part (red area above) is the currently selected and active app inside Aragon Core. The installed apps are listed inside the menu, and are loaded when the user selects one of them. Continuing with the web browser analogy, these apps could be compared to websites.

These two pieces are technically separate, but they need to provide an integrated experience: it is extremely important to us that users don't get the feeling that they are using an app in an app. These parts need to feel like they are one and the same. And because we want people to develop Aragon apps, the UI toolkit need to be simple, helpful and pleasant to use. Using it will never be mandatory, but we want to provide the users with the fundamental tools to build Aragon apps.

Preview animation of Aragon Core v0.5

This toolkit is named Aragon UI, and you can find it on GitHub. It is built using React and styled-components, and it is already being used internally by our team on all different aspects of Aragon, while still being under active development at the same time. So more updates on that later!

You can help!

There are many ways you can contribute to Aragon. If you feel like helping the project in any way, don't hesitate to contact us! You can consult the Aragon Development Overview, and ping us on Aragon Chat or on GitHub! 🤗