Design Systems · Evaluation
IBM Carbon
Compliance Index score
50.8/100 · F
↓ 9.8 pts since last week (60.6 → 50.8)
Per-category breakdown
Each category is scored independently. The cohort average shows how this site compares to the 30-site cohort in each dimension.
Evaluation
IBM Carbon scores 50.8/F on the Designesy Compliance Index — 14 of 40 checks passed, 6 failed, 15 warned, 2 skipped. The cohort mean is 62.2/D across 30 scored sites. IBM Carbon sits 18% below the cohort mean.
Strongest category: Interaction at 100.0%. Weakest scored category: Tokens at 25.0%. The gap between best and worst is the finding — most systems are strong in one dimension and absent in another.
Since last week's score, IBM Carbon dropped by 9.8 points — moving from 60.6 to 50.8.
The engine detected 15 custom properties at :root — a modest token layer.
F-grade means IBM Carbon scores below 60 — the contract's pass threshold. The failing checks are not subjective: they are missing CSS primitives that the contract requires at :root.
This evaluation is deterministic — no LLM, no human judgment, no survey. The same 40-check engine that scored IBM Carbon scores every site on the leaderboard. Re-score carbondesignsystem.com live to see if anything has changed since 2026-08-03.
Scored 2026-08-03 against contract v0.4.0 (40 checks, 14 weighted categories). Re-scored weekly via GitHub Action.
Compared to Design Systems peers
IBM Carbon ranks #12 of 14 in the Design Systems category.
Cohort context
This site
50.8/100
Cohort mean
62.2/100
Cohort median
62.6/100
Delta from mean
-11.4
Why this site is scored
Mature token system