The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
Foundations serves as GitLab's strategic design infrastructure layer, operating the design system and accessibility initiatives that enable consistent, scalable product experiences across the DevSecOps platform. The team provides an essential foundation that supports GitLab's ability to deliver cohesive user experiences at enterprise scale.
The team manages Pajamas, GitLab's design system, which provides the building blocks for consistent user experiences across the entire platform. Foundations ensures that product teams can efficiently build new features while maintaining platform consistency through reusable components and clear guidelines.
Foundations addresses accessibility as both a compliance imperative and competitive advantage, ensuring GitLab remains available to all users—supporting the company's mission to enable everyone to contribute.
Foundations transforms design consistency from operational necessity into strategic advantage, providing an underlying framework that maintains product quality and development velocity as the platform grows in complexity and scale.
The Foundations stage is made up of two groups. You can find the direction pages of these groups here:
Contributing to the design system should feel productive and approachable. In the past, the process has sometimes felt slow, unclear, or overly guarded, which creates friction for teams and limits the system’s ability to grow. In FY26-Q3, we will roll out a new contribution model that clarifies expectations and ownership while making it easier for teams to propose changes. Alongside these process improvements, we will invest in the relationships and support that help contributors work through the model to propose new assets or refine existing ones with confidence.
As GitLab transforms into an AI-native product, Pajamas must provide the foundational infrastructure for new patterns of interaction, layout, and expression. We're actively updating core elements—components, layout structures, and design tokens—to align with this evolved visual direction while establishing comprehensive guidance for AI interaction patterns. By creating these foundational patterns within the design system, we ensure that AI-powered experiences maintain consistency across the platform as teams experiment with new capabilities and use cases.
GitLab's renewed focus on product-led growth demands design patterns optimized for user activation, engagement, and conversion—critical metrics for achieving the company's growth targets. Through our reimagined contribution model, we're enabling Growth teams to rapidly iterate on conversion-focused patterns and contribute successful experiments back to the system. By facilitating direct collaboration between Growth teams and Pajamas, we ensure that high-performing PLG patterns become immediately available to all teams, accelerating the consistency that drives user engagement and reduces development overhead. PLG-specific guidance will be embedded directly into Pajamas, from onboarding flows that reduce time-to-value to engagement patterns that drive feature adoption.
We're evolving GitLab's visual language to reflect our brand personality within the product experience, moving beyond the dated UI that has remained largely unchanged for years. This work establishes a refreshed design vision with visual examples of updated patterns, layouts, and components, along with guiding principles for implementation across common workflows. Our approach focuses on creating systematic foundations through page templates and reusable patterns that enable rapid, cascading updates instead of requiring changes to hundreds of individual files.
We’re revisiting the current state of components and patterns across the design system. This includes auditing what exists, identifying quality or usability issues, and working through pre-existing feature requests. We use a component health assessment to evaluate where components fall short and where improvements will have the most impact. This work focuses on components and patterns in the core layer of the design system.
We're transforming accessibility from reactive compliance work into a proactive, embedded practice across GitLab's development lifecycle, expanding our addressable market while demonstrating our commitment to enabling everyone to contribute. Our approach combines direct technical implementation—working through existing accessibility issue backlogs using semantic HTML, ARIA, CSS, and JavaScript following WCAG guidelines—with systematic process improvements including comprehensive documentation, organized backlogs, and maintaining our Accessibility Conformance Report to track progress against standards.