TRMNL has open-sourced Framework, the design system behind its ePaper dashboard devices — billed as the first UI kit built specifically for ePaper development.
The problem it solves is unusual: designing for an 800x480 one-bit display means no colour, no anti-aliasing to lean on, slow refresh, and no room for the soft visual hierarchy that normal web UI depends on. Framework is the accumulated set of answers to that, extracted into something anyone can build against.
Components — tables, labels, stat widgets and other layout primitives that reflow across device classes rather than assuming one screen size.
Charts — Highcharts, reconfigured for one-bit rendering and low-resolution legibility.
Typography — a custom typeface drawn for legibility on constrained displays, with Inter for supporting text.
A model picker — pulls device dimensions and capabilities from an API, so the same markup targets ePaper panels, televisions, tablets and iPads.
terminalize() — a JS runtime pass handling value formatting, text scaling and regional adaptation, with a hard guarantee that an arbitrary {{ variable }} never breaks the layout.
Constraint-driven design systems tend to be more instructive than general-purpose ones. Framework is a working example of designing for a display that refuses most of the tricks web UI relies on, and the overflow-proofing in terminalize() is a neat piece of defensive templating that generalises well beyond ePaper.
Source, docs and examples are on GitHub.
