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Card

A Panel with an anatomy, so every card is spaced the same way: media flush to the edges, a header (title, description, one action), a body, and a footer whose controls are sm, pinned to the bottom so a row of cards lines its actions up. A Card alone in a list item fills it, so a Grid of cards as a list is one height a row. With href or onClick the whole card is pressable: the title becomes the link or button stretched over the card, it presses a pixel into the surface and sends Panel's ripple, and its own action and footer controls stay separate targets. Closed: slots are props, spacing is size.

Feel A molded slab you can set things on. A card that goes somewhere lifts toward the light as you reach for it and sinks a pixel as you press, sending a wave out from your finger.

Preview

Backups

Nightly, kept for 30 days.

Last backup at 02:14. Nothing failed.

Getting started

Install and theme in five minutes.

Latency

42ms
p95

Or let the agent fetch it: get_component("card") on the Echo MCP server.

Installation

npx echo-ui-cli add card

First time? Run npx echo-ui-cli init once — it sets the project up, and add refuses to run before it.

At a glance

Version
0.3.0
Weight
2.1 KB · 2.4 KB with what it imports · 1.4 KB of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)
Needs
panel (Echo, brought with it), size (Echo, brought with it)
Keyboard
an interactive card is one Tab stop; Enter follows its link (Enter or Space presses it when it's a button), and its action and footer controls are Tab stops of their own.
Reduced motion
An interactive card doesn't sink or ripple; it still lights its focus ring.
Sound
tap when an interactive card is pressed, inside a SoundProvider.

Usage

tsx
import { Card } from "@/echo/card";

<Card title="Backups" description="Nightly">{body}</Card>

Composition

Card → Panel material; header, body, footer (SizeProvider sm); stretched title link when interactive

Examples

A settings card

Title, description, body and footer actions.

tsx
<Card
  title="Backups"
  description="Nightly, kept for 30 days."
  footer={<HardwareButton>Restore</HardwareButton>}
>
  Last backup 02:14.
</Card>

A card that goes somewhere

The whole card is the link; the title is its name.

tsx
<Card title="Getting started" description="Install and theme in five minutes." href="/docs/installation" />

A row of plans

In a list, every card is the row's height and the actions line up.

tsx
<Grid as="ul" minItemWidth="16rem">
  {plans.map((plan: { name: string; price: string; features: string[] }) => (
    <li key={plan.name}>
      <Card title={plan.name} description={plan.price} footer={<HardwareButton fullWidth>Choose {plan.name}</HardwareButton>}>
        <Stack as="ul" gap={0}>{plan.features.map((f: string) => <Item key={f} as="li" size="sm" title={f} />)}</Stack>
      </Card>
    </li>
  ))}
</Grid>

A readout

The screen variant, for numbers.

tsx
<Card variant="screen" size="sm" title="Latency"><StatTile value="42" unit="ms" label="p95" /></Card>

Accessibility

  • The title is a real heading (h3 by default; headingLevel changes it).
  • An interactive card is one link or button named by its title, with one focus ring around the whole card; a screen reader doesn't hear the card twice.
  • The action and footer controls stay separate targets with their own names, above the stretched link.
  • The ripple is decoration, hidden from assistive tech and still under reduced motion.
  • Keyboard: an interactive card is one Tab stop; Enter follows its link (Enter or Space presses it when it's a button), and its action and footer controls are Tab stops of their own.

Tested against WCAG 2.2 AA on every release:

  • axe — No axe violations, in the component's own gallery and on its page.
  • keyboard — Every action is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone.
  • focus-visible — Focus is visible on every focusable part, in normal and forced-colors mode.
  • forced-colors — State stays visible when the look's colours are replaced by the system's.
  • target-size — Every target's real hit area is at least 24×24px, at every density.
  • reflow — Content reflows into 320px and survives a doubled text size.

Not covered: screen-reader: not yet verified by a person. Everything above is a machine check; a person has not yet driven this component with a screen reader.

Motion & sound

Motion tokens
--echo-duration-tick, --echo-duration-swap
Reduced motion
An interactive card doesn't sink or ripple; it still lights its focus ring.
Sound
tap when an interactive card is pressed, inside a SoundProvider.

Props

Card props
PropTypeDefault
title requiredThe card's name. With href or onClick it is also the link or button.unknown
descriptionA line under the title.unknown
actionOne control at the header's end: a menu, a toggle, a small button.unknown
mediaAn image, chart or preview across the top, flush to the edges.unknown
childrenThe body.unknown
footerActions along the bottom, from the content's start edge; their controls default to sm. One action across the whole footer is a fullWidth key.unknown
variantraised plastic, or a screen well for a readout."raised" | "screen""raised"
sizePadding and gaps: sm for dense dashboards, lg for a feature."sm" | "md" | "lg""md"
hrefThe whole card goes here.string
onClickThe whole card does this.function
headingLevelThe title's heading level.2 | 3 | 43

Anti-patterns

  • Never put a second link in an interactive card's body: the card is already one, and a screen reader hears the card as its title.
  • Never make every card on a screen interactive and give them all actions too: pick one way in.
  • Don't nest a Card in a Card; use a divider or an Item list inside.

Changelog

  • v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · AddedThe drawn device (echo-ui-core, echo-ui-cli, every component that draws its own material). A seed's new render setting is molded (Echo as it has always been: plastic lit by one key light) or drawn: the same parts drawn in the ink, the way a spec sheet draws a key. Every part is outlined at one weight (--echo-line, --echo-line-width), hollow on the body; a raised part stands on a hard ink edge as deep as it rises and travels down it when pressed; a recess is an outline drawn inside; something floating stands on a deeper edge. There's no light, so no gloss, no soft shadow and no glow: what a molded device lights (an LED, the rail, a readout, the focus ring, a fader's knob, a radio's pip) is solid ink, and a low-emphasis action is its label underlined. In black and white (the accent the ink) "on" is solid ink and what's drawn on it inverts: a switch's thumb turns paper, a fader's knob is knocked out with a paper ring. The primary key is the paper key that stands highest, on an ink edge twice as deep as a neutral one's, the way a spec sheet draws its CTA. The accent stays the seed's own colour as a flat fill for what's on (a chosen segment, a checked box, a slider's travel, a switch that's on), so an acid highlighter is acid, not the olive a molded device holds it to; what's drawn on it is the ink, or the body when the accent is too deep for the ink. Pressing, travel, sound, what each material is for and every contrast guarantee are unchanged. npx echo-ui-cli style set render drawn turns it on; a style sets it in its seed; the published style and config schemas describe it, and DESIGN.md says how a drawn device builds. A molded device renders exactly as before: every line is 0px wide there, and each drawn value a component reads (--echo-drawn-fill, -on-fill, -ink, -rule, -glass, -hollow, -decoration) is initial, so it falls back to what the component always drew. HardwareButton's bed is the one new hand-tuned shadow: a drawn key stands on its own edge instead of being drawn in a recess.
  • v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · ChangedEvery item needs echo-ui-core 0.3.0 (all components). The drawn device, readability past AA and the design tests live in core, and the components that use them are built against it, so each item now declares echo-ui-core >=0.3.0 <0.4.0. Update core with the items: npm install echo-ui-core@^0.3.0 (or your package manager's), then npx echo-ui-cli update. An item whose files didn't change is the same code under a new version; the 0.2.0 files stay published.
  • v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · FixedA row of Cards lines up, and Item shows its whole title (BUG-188). A Card alone in a list item fills it, so <Grid as="ul"> of cards is one height a row; the footer sits at the bottom and starts at the content's edge instead of the far end (a fullWidth key spans it). Item's title and description wrap onto more lines instead of ending in "…"; the new truncate keeps one line each.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · AddedThe light device (echo-ui-core, echo-ui-cli). Echo can be light: a pale chassis makes a device molded in light plastic, like a white calculator or a cream radio, and a dark one makes the device Echo has always been. There's no setting and no mode to switch; the chassis decides (devicePolarity, and values.polarity on the theme). On a light device the page is light: its ground, the well, is the body barely set in. Caps get their own ladder, a step lighter than the body with a lit rim that stops short of white, so they keep their bevel; undersides and seams are shaded darker; dim text moves toward the ground by the same step as on a dark device, and reads about 6:1 on it. Screens are paper glass printed in ink, because a glow on a pale body is a smudge. What's lit (an LED, the current rail) is still the accent, held to 3:1 on every ground, so on is brighter than off; the text it prints (a readout, a count, a current tab) and the focus ring are the accent's ink, a step deeper and held to AA, in the new accent-ink role. The primary cap is the same cap as a dark device's, the accent with a light label: its label is the new primary-cap-ink role, and progress cells, loader dots and a meter's fill, the same plastic, read 3:1 on the page. A neutral cap or a slider that fills with it under its own dark label fills with the new pour-* roles, the accent's pale stops. Shadows are drawn at half their weight, in a deep colour of the body's own hue (--echo-cast-ink) instead of black. Every guarantee holds as it does on a dark device, and the contrast sweep now runs on light bodies too. A dark seed makes exactly the theme it did before, and the new roles equal the ones they stand for there. The components that mixed a recess toward black, painted paper in the text colour or lit a pillow of light with it read the theme's new --echo-shade-ink, --echo-paper-stock and --echo-paper-ink instead, with the old value as the fallback, and a reflective screen reads --echo-screen-*; the components that print a lit label read --echo-primary-cap-ink and --echo-accent-ink the same way; every rail is drawn in the glow, and every focus ring, the ring recipes included, in the ink. style use wears a light style now, and style check says which device a style makes. A dark screen tint on a light body is still refused: one text colour can't serve both, and the theme says so.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · AddedSix containers: Card, Item, Stack & Grid, Collapsible, ScrollArea and Link. The pieces every screen is laid out with, so nobody spaces a card by hand. All six are closed: their slots and spacing are props, not a className. - Card is a Panel with an anatomy (media, a header with one action, a body, a footer whose controls are sm) and size for its padding. With href or onClick the whole card is one link or button, named by its title, with one focus ring; it lifts as you reach for it, sinks a pixel as you press and sends Panel's ripple out from your finger. - Item is the list row: media, title, description, trailing content, ruled by a hairline. swipeActions sit behind it: swipe it and they slide into view, and Tab reaches each one, sliding the row open the same way, so the gesture is never the only way in. - Stack & Grid (echo-layout) take gaps as steps on the space scale; a row wraps and a Grid's columns never get wider than the screen. - Collapsible is one disclosure on its own, in Accordion's ruled style; closed content stays findable with find-in-page, which opens it. - ScrollArea scrolls inside itself with a groove and a molded thumb, shades whichever edge has more to see, and is a named region the keyboard can scroll. - Link keeps the words in the text colour and draws the accent as the underline (accent text on the chassis is under AA); external says it opens a new tab; render takes your router's link.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedComponents whose shadow is a recipe read it by name. 71 shadows in 54 items now say var(--echo-shadow-<name>, <the same shadow>), so they look exactly as they did (every docs page was compared before and after) and follow a theme's recipes. Scope declares the recipes that read the accent again, so a Scope's own colour still reaches its focus rings and glows, and reflective screens do the same for theirs. Shadows that move with their part (a cap's drop as it's pressed) stay in the component.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedComments only, no behaviour change. Comments in the component source used to cite documents, milestones and ticket numbers from Echo's own planning, none of which exist in your project. The citations are gone and the sentences around them stay. Where a comment was only a citation, it now says what it meant. Three development warnings (HardwareButton's engraved/caption checks and StatusDot's missing-label check) also dropped the ticket code at the end of the message. echo-ui diff will show changes in most items; none of them are to code.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedAn item's version is now a function of declared data, not of how the changelog is formatted. The version an item ships under is published once and never rewritten, and it used to be inferred from prose: a regex for a bolded "Breaking" run across the whole unreleased section, and attribution by "does a bullet mention this name in backticks". One breaking entry therefore moved every item that changed that cycle, and an entry explaining that "Menu and Sheet are unchanged here" filed itself as a change to Menu and Sheet — which it really had.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedThe agent brief says Echo has not shipped. llms.txt and the MCP server's instructions led with npx echo-ui-cli init, and that name on npm is a reserved stub with no executable — so a model following the brief wrote an install step that fails with npx's own error. The brief now opens with the caveat, and the docs carry it on every surface that shows a command. One switch (CLI_RELEASED) silences all of them at launch, and a test refuses to let one move without the others. Affects all components only in what the brief says about installing them; no item's props, CSS or rendered semantics change.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedEcho's home is echo-ui.com. The registry, the docs and the packages all move to it from echo.nawwara.studio. Nothing was published under the old host, so no echo.json anywhere points at it and there is nothing to migrate — this is the last release where that is true.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedWeights, line heights, letter-spacing, z-index, border widths and icon sizes come from the theme scales in all components, with the old value as a fallback, so components keep working with echo-ui-core@0.0.1. Strays moved to the nearest step: most by under a pixel; HardwareButton icons are 14/16/20px (were 15/17/19).
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedOn a phone, a tapped part no longer stays lit (BUG-143). A phone leaves what you tapped under :hover until the next tap, so a table row stayed shaded and a trigger stayed lit after the finger lifted. Hover styles now apply only where there's a pointer that can hover (@media (hover: hover)), in all 23 components that had one. Checked, active and focus styles that shared a rule with them still apply everywhere.
  • v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedContent now reflows into a 320px screen (400% zoom) and survives a doubled browser text size (WCAG 1.4.10, 1.4.4), across all components. Select's 180px floor, NumberField's readout, Segmented and Steps as flex items, EmptyState's grid columns, and Avatar's fixed-pixel disc all gave way; Panel counts its padding inside a width you set (box-sizing: border-box), so a <Panel style={{ width: 220 }}> is now 220px wide overall rather than 260px.