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Chameleon 🦎

Interactive colour template previews for the Design System.

Chameleon allows users to change and share different colour palettes using the Australian Government Design System. It is a server that takes query parameters altering the appearance of the template.

You can access it through a user interface at https://designsystem.gov.au/templates/home/customise if you want to use it locally you can follow the instructions below.

Install

Clone chameleon into a local directory:

git clone git@github.com:govau/chameleon.git

Make sure you are in your cloned directory and install the dependencies:

npm install

Then run npm run start or npm run watch.

Getting started

Once the server is running you should be able to connect to it with http://localhost:3000/chameleon.

Chameleon looks like a full page template using the Australian Government Design System. It has multiple templates in the /templates directory. You can access the templates by navigating to the url http://localhost:3000/chameleon/content.

To change the colours you can add a query parameter. http://localhost:3000/chameleon/content?action=red&background=#eee.

Using query parameters you can modify the templates and share them. The supported query parameters are:

• text, the default text colour
• action, the interactive colour used on buttons and links
• focus, the focus colour when interactive elements receive focus
• background, the background colour
• textDark, dark variation of the text colour
• actionDark, dark variation of the action colour
• focusDark, dark variation of the focus colour
• backgroundDark, dark variation of the background colour

How it works

The server expressjs reads the data from the HTML files based on the URL. If there are valid query parameters it generates a new stylesheet and replaces the <link rel="stylesheet" href="/chameleon/assets/css/main.css"> with the new styles. If there is an invalid colour entered it will log errors in the page template returned to the user.

We then serve the API to our users in an iframe, allowing users to modify the user interface with a form on the frontend. As we use query parameters the custom templates can be shared with peers.

Contributing

Wuhuu! thanks for considering contributing! We are always looking to make chameleon better, please have a look at our issues and use the above documentation to make changes and create a pull request.

Contributors: