Table Of Content
Style guides should be attractive, inviting, visible, clear, and easy to use. As mentioned above, they should be aware that a whole host of audiences will be viewing them, so should therefore aim to be welcoming and useful for as many people as possible. Style guide maintenance is a hugely important topic and deserves to be covered in detail, so we’ll dive into how to create maintainable style guides in chapter 5. Pattern libraries are often treated as auxiliary projects, rather than as the component parts of the final product. By treating pattern libraries as something separate from the core project, they tend to fall into the nice to have category and become first on the chopping block when the going gets tough.
Atomic Design: The Book
It’s fascinating to hear the inconsistent names designers, developers, product owners, and other stakeholders all have for the same UI pattern. “Oh, we call that the utility bar.” “Oh, we call it the admin nav.” “Oh, we call it the floating action area! ” This exercise is an opportunity to unearth and iron out disparities between pattern labels, and also establish names for previously unlabeled patterns.
Why should organizations create atomic designs?
Piggybacking off another project is a great way to sneak a pattern library into your organization. Style guides are important tools that help prevent chaos, both from a design and development standpoint and also from an organizational perspective. Here’s why style guides are now essential tools for modern web design and development. Pattern libraries, also known as front-end style guides, UI libraries, or component libraries, are quickly becoming a cornerstone of modern interface design. The rise of the web and content-managed websites makes it easier than ever for many people within an organization to publish content.
Creating maintainable design systems
Having the design represented in the browser in addition to other design artifacts gives teams the ability to paint a richer, more realistic picture of the UI they’re crafting. Teams may demonstrate an aesthetically focused design idea as a static image, and simultaneously demonstrate a working prototype of that same idea in the browser. After plugging the front-end code into a CMS, frantically finalizing the site’s content, and doing some last-minute QA testing, the team finally launches the site. While no one says it out loud, there’s a tinge of disappointment in the air alongside the joy and relief of getting the project out the door. After all, the live site lacks the glossy polish that the comps promised to the stakeholders, and friction between disciplines has bruised some relationships.
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Necessary design elements
When standing alone, a button may not be able to serve any purpose, but put it in context with other design elements and a simple button can add great value to the user experience. Atomic design, developed by Brad Frost and Dave Olsen, is a methodology for crafting design systems with five fundamental building blocks, which, when combined, promote consistency, modularity, and scalability. This component is amazingly complex from an organizational standpoint. A homepage carousel on an e-commerce website requires input from a host of disciplines across the organization. Business owners and editorial staff must choose products to be featured in the carousel.
From the creation of atoms to the final design in the form of pages, designers know the value of each component. This is extremely important for organizations with big design teams working on multiple projects at the same time. If a structured process is created at the beginning, it helps the designers understand their roles and apply their skills accordingly.
It’s more important to make steps in the right direction than exhaust a ton of effort painting unrealistic pictures of what you want the final piece to be. A sound design system doesn’t roll off an assembly line, but is rather sculpted in iterative loops, building up fidelity as the project progresses. Of course, it’s preferable to get your clients, colleagues, and stakeholders excited about creating an interface design system, or at the very least get their blessing to pursue the project in a modular fashion.
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Show, don’t tell: the power of interface inventories
Back-end developers need to ensure the component is properly wired up to the back-end system. The team at Phase2 Technology achieved the holy grail by using Pattern Lab as their pattern library development tool and Drupal as their content management system. A misconception about design systems is that once they’re established, they become an omnipotent and unchangeable source of truth. Thinking in such a rigid way is a surefire way to have your design system effort backfire. Users’ proximity to and involvement in the creation of the design system will undoubtedly vary. You may work on a singular product at a scrappy startup, so your small team could be simultaneously creating and using the design system.
These user interface frameworks provide designers with a collection of preassembled HTML patterns, CSS styles, and JavaScript to add functionality to interactive components like dropdowns and carousels. In essence, these frameworks are handy tool kits for quickly assembling interfaces. If atoms are the basic building blocks of matter, then the atoms of our interfaces serve as the foundational building blocks that comprise all our user interfaces. These atoms include basic HTML elements like form labels, inputs, buttons, and others that can’t be broken down any further without ceasing to be functional.
In all of these examples, the underlying templates are the same, but the user interfaces change to reflect the dynamic nature of the content. These variations directly influence how the underlying molecules, organisms, and templates are constructed. Therefore, creating pages that account for these variations helps us create more resilient design systems. Building up from molecules to more elaborate organisms provides designers and developers with an important sense of context. Organisms demonstrate those smaller, simpler components in action and serve as distinct patterns that can be used again and again. The product grid organism can be employed anywhere a group of products needs to be displayed, from category listings to search results to related products.
By approaching this design exploration in a cross-disciplinary way, teams can find balance between aesthetics, technical feasibility, usability, and functionality. While style tiles are great for exploring design atmosphere, they’re still a bit abstract. To get a sense of how those design ingredients will be applied to an interface, it’s important to quickly move into something a bit more tangible than a style tile. But does that mean visual designers need to jump from style tiles straight into full comps? It’s essential to establish a solid visual direction for the project, so how does a visual designer do that without burning a ton of time on up-front high-fidelity comps? That’s the question that designer Samantha Warren answered when she created style tiles, a deliverable that’s more tangible than a mood board but not as high-fidelity as a fully baked comp.
In this way, the atomic design system is of great value to UI/UX designers, who are almost always working on challenging problems. Learn about this unique approach to UI/UX design and how to create a robust system. Each component or service has its own isolated environment — everything needed to work on its own instance. You can see that each component /Buttons & /Form has its own set of styles, actions, and unit or integration tests that act like an independent piece of feature in your app. (You can also add its own set of images and other local variables.) This makes it much easier, and reduces your efforts, to test your code consistently and effectively. Brad’s memories of high school chemistry class began crystallizing with his career as an early mobile web developer.
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