What problem does this address?

It can be difficult to differentiate between what’s being edited at a local level (e.g. a post, styles affecting a single block instance etc) vs at a global level (e.g. global styles, editing template parts, reusable blocks etc). There is also a lack of feedback on what global style changes actually look like in the context of your site unless the page you're editing contains the specific block/colour/type.

Global Styles, and in general the block based approach of Gutenberg, represents a great opportunity to capture more of the modern designer/developer segment who may put more emphasis on the idea of design systems / style guides etc. How might we give the concept a stronger identity / more weight?

What is your proposed solution?

Apologies in advance if I've missed any previous explorations and/or misunderstood what's currently available.

I wanted to explore the idea of creating a dedicated space for all things global. For the sake of this concept we can call it your “Library” but there are many labels to describe the idea (e.g. design system or style guide or brand kit).

Your library represents everything you have available to you to craft your site and content, including styles and blocks that apply those styles. Your library can be extended by yourself (e.g. creating new patterns) or bring in patterns/styles/templates etc from the community (pattern directory).

Library changes can be previewed against your site before publishing just like any draft post.

You can push local changes to your library so that you can design in context if needed. e.g. I need to fine tune button styles as they don’t look quite right in a particular post. Clicking the button directly on canvas and modifying its styles is the most obvious way to do this.

This may just be a repackaging of what’s already on offer via global styles sidebar and template part/template/reusable block editing. It's an attempt to bring all of that together into a more holistic experience.