At Salesforce, we’re dedicated to delivering distinctive consumer experiences that empower our prospects to attain their targets. Our most up-to-date achievement is the final availability of SLDS 2, the most recent design system for Salesforce merchandise constructed on the Lightning platform. This launch marks a big milestone in our journey to create a extra intuitive, cohesive, and scalable consumer expertise throughout our merchandise.
What’s new in SLDS 2
SLDS 2 is now usually obtainable, with Winter ’26, setting a brand new customary for human and agent collaboration on the Lightning platform. This replace brings a extra composable framework and a sturdy styling API that may adapt and develop with our prospects. Together with a visible refresh, SLDS 2 opens the door to a brand new chapter of Salesforce experiences which can be dynamically generated, conversational, and deeply customized.
Probably the most thrilling options in SLDS 2 is darkish mode (beta), now obtainable in Starter Suite orgs. Darkish mode is our most extremely requested characteristic, and it gives a number of advantages, together with diminished eye pressure in low-light situations, decreased gentle sensitivity, and enhanced readability for customers with low imaginative and prescient. This characteristic is unique to SLDS 2 themes, making it a compelling cause for purchasers to transition to the brand new design system.
Salesforce UI modernization over time, transferring from SLDS 1 to SLDS 2 to darkish mode.
Wanting forward: the way forward for SLDS 2
As we glance to the long run, we’re guided by Salesforce Chief Expertise Officer Kat Holmes and her mission to “make Salesforce quick, compelling, and simple to make use of,” with versatile and deeply customized human-to-agent interfaces. To organize for this future, we’re repeatedly evolving SLDS 2 as an agentic design system with a composable structure that may adapt to consumer wants in actual time.
We’re at the moment targeted on enriching our element blueprints with context-aware metadata to generate UI on-demand, primarily based on consumer conduct and AI interactions. We additionally goal to determine SLDS 2 as a common design system, increasing our affect past Lightning and serving to customers deal with design challenges throughout any UI framework. By positioning SLDS 2 because the design data layer for constructing an agentic enterprise, we are able to develop alongside our prospects within the shift towards conversational and dynamic experiences.
Buyer suggestions: shaping the roadmap
Buyer suggestions is on the coronary heart of how we’re shaping our Design System Roadmap. Lately, we’ve heard from world enterprise prospects that they like a managed, phased strategy to their SLDS 2 rollout. In response, we’re introducing group-based SLDS 2 activation with the Summer season ’26 launch. This characteristic will allow prospects to activate SLDS 2 for particular segments of customers, reasonably than org-wide. By providing this selection for a phased rollout, and repeatedly enhancing our instruments, we’re hyperfocused on making the SLDS 2 transition smoother for our prospects.
Design System Roadmap
Give us your suggestions on the Design System Roadmap
Upcoming options: enhanced Themes and Branding
Prospects transitioning to SLDS 2 have quite a bit to stay up for. With the Summer season ’26 launch, we’re planning to launch an enhanced Themes and Branding interface that may considerably broaden no-code customization controls. This replace will enable customized decisions for typography, shadows, sizing, spacing, illustration colour, and extra. We’ll additionally embrace an inline preview display to examine and confirm customized themes as they’re being created.
We’re even experimenting with the potential of a theming agent that makes use of AI to routinely detect and apply your organization’s model colour palette, and pure language to customise your theme by means of dialog not clicks.
The function of AI in SLDS 2
AI is quickly changing into a vital collaboration device for builders and designers. We’re excited concerning the potential to reinforce AI instruments with SLDS 2 so as to add context and consistency to AI-generated experiences. Through the use of SLDS 2 alongside AI instruments, builders can collaborate extra successfully throughout roles and generate correct, on-brand, and production-ready code. When AI works alongside a foundational design system like SLDS 2, it is not going to solely velocity up the design-to-code workflow but additionally foster a shared understanding and language between designers and builders.
Image this: A developer is vibe coding elements with the most recent third-party AI device, which they’ve related to the Salesforce DX MCP server. Now, with the guardrails of the design system in place, they will shortly create production-quality code that follows SLDS 2 type pointers. Their customized elements will work in gentle and darkish mode, and are inherently future-proof, as a result of the precise styling hooks had been routinely utilized.
The potential of SLDS 2 to enhance AI-generated UI high quality, consistency, and accuracy is energizing. However our imaginative and prescient expands past Lightning interfaces. We’re asking ourselves, “How can our customers profit from the metadata, context, and unstyled blueprints of SLDS 2 throughout any platform?” Whether or not you’re constructing for Slack, React, and even your personal design system, we envision a world the place people and brokers, engaged on any platform, are powered by SLDS 2.
Challenges and alternatives
Designing for AI brokers requires UX and engineering groups to shift the way in which they work. Reskilling in and mastering such areas as dialog design, ontology, context engineering, and immediate design is essential. It’s an thrilling frontier the place design goes deeper into the know-how stack to form the way in which AI behaves and interacts with people.
As we proceed to evolve SLDS 2, we’re dedicated to delivering a design system that meets the altering wants of our prospects. We’re excited to see the influence that SLDS 2 could have on the consumer expertise and stay up for persevering with this journey with our group.
