Sunday, April 28, 2024

Maintaining Design Systems

atomic design brad frost

These past 6 years have been exciting, and it’s been fun watching all of these design system concepts, insights, ingredients, and tools emerge. So does it make sense to go back to the drawing board and formally modify atomic design to consider all these new concepts? The design system is taking shape and the team is cooking with gas to bring the project home. At this stage, UI patterns are well established, the team is taking some final steps to tighten everything up and prepare for launch. The beautiful thing about a pattern-based workflow is that as each pattern becomes more fully baked, any template that includes the pattern will become more fully baked as well. That means the level of effort to create new templates decreases dramatically over the course of the project, until eventually creating a new template mostly involves stitching together existing patterns.

Clean separation between structure and content

With input from the stakeholders and team, we iterated over the header pattern to massage the layout, IA, aesthetic details, and functionality to arrive at the solution we ultimately launched with. Though the client didn’t know it, I had been building out a working HTML version of the header behind the scenes in Pattern Lab. ” Instruct participants to consider visual properties they find interesting, such as typography, color, density, layout, illustration style, and general vibe. No one in their right mind would mistake this blocked out grayscale page as complete, but it provides more than enough information to have important conversations about the page structure and hierarchy. With the floodgates opened, the other stakeholders suddenly realize they too have opinions and constructive criticism they’d like to share.

Atomic Design: The Book

Atomic Prototyping: Fastest way to beautiful interactions - SitePoint

Atomic Prototyping: Fastest way to beautiful interactions.

Posted: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]

So while we were focusing on designing one specific pattern, we were simultaneously taking into account the context of where that pattern would be employed. Turning explorations into finished patterns is a blurry, imperfect process. This should come as absolutely no surprise to you by this point in the book.

Most of the examples I could find about React/Redux applications (either client side or universal) are very simple…

Color me naive, but I don’t think this helps foster a culture of collaboration. The long-term benefits that style guides provide are obvious to those who are already thinking about the long game. The challenge, therefore, becomes convincing those stuck in a short-term, quarter-by-quarter mindset that establishing a thoughtful design system is a smart investment in the future. By now the benefits of creating design systems should be abundantly clear, and hopefully visions of sugar plums and beautiful style guides are dancing through your head. But to reach style guide nirvana, you must first overcome the many treacherous challenges that come with the territory.

By the time I got to the payment form, I felt like I couldn’t trust the company to successfully and securely process my payment. In chapter 4, we’ll detail how to establish an effective pattern-based workflow. Slowly, but surely, these concepts found their way into web designers’ workflows. In the early 2000s we saw the introduction of libraries like YUI and jQuery UI that provided developers with a toolkit of widgets and patterns to create more consistent user interfaces. Atomic design is an interface design methodology consisting of five distinct stages working together to create deliberate design systems.

atomic design brad frost

It’s these questions that led me to create This Is Responsive, a showcase of responsive patterns that demonstrate the various ways a particular component could be executed in a responsive environment. Maybe the homepage simply consists of a tagline and a background image, which means it could be done by lunch. Or maybe it’s chock-full of carousels, dynamic forms, and third-party integrations. In that case, maybe the homepage will take several months to complete. The content we pour into our UIs at the page stage will influence the characteristics and parameters of the underlying design patterns.

Design systems

In the fast-paced world of design, where user experiences shape the success of digital products, having a systematic approach is paramount. Style guides often jump straight into code snippets and pattern usage for the benefit of the design system users. Of course, a pattern library needs to be helpful for the people actually making use of the patterns, but treating a style guide solely as a developer resource limits its potential.

Why Design Systems Need APIs - Q&A with Louis Chenais, Chief Evangelist at Specify - InfoQ.com

Why Design Systems Need APIs - Q&A with Louis Chenais, Chief Evangelist at Specify.

Posted: Wed, 21 Jul 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

atomic design brad frost

For a project I did for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, I started by stubbing out the basic information architecture for a page on a site. There’s a ton of up-front strategic and research work that can and should happen toward the beginning of a project. As with anything, it’s about using the right tools at the right time to articulate the right things.

What is it we’re making again?

Up until this point we’ve been talking about establishing a general aesthetic direction and then designing some patterns to experiment with the application of that aesthetic direction. These relatively lo-fi tactics allow teams to explore freely, iterate quickly, and get feedback sooner. You can set up site search, a shopping cart table, a placeholder product detail page, the homepage, and checkout pages. Start marking up the sign-up and login forms, the forgot password flow, and dashboard. And, of course, most websites will have a header, footer, and main content area. Set up shell templates and write basic markup for patterns you anticipate using.

Molecules are groups of atoms bonded together and are the smallest fundamental units of a compound. These molecules take on their own properties and serve as the backbone of our design systems. Like atoms in nature they’re fairly abstract and often not terribly useful on their own. However, they’re good as a reference in the context of a pattern library as you can see all your global styles laid out at a glance.

Capital-A Agile is a specific methodology for software development, equipped with a manifesto and accompanying frameworks like Scrum and Lean. But even before the launch party confetti is swept up, the calls start coming in. ” cry the users, who spent years learning the previous interface and functionality.

One of the most powerful benefits of interface inventories is that you can show them to anyone, including non-designers and developers, and they’ll understand why inconsistent UIs are problematic. You don’t need to be a designer to recognize that having 37 unique button styles probably isn’t a good idea. Here’s your opportunity to make it crystal clear to stakeholders that approaching your UI in a more systematic way makes great sense for both your users and your organization. Creating an interface inventory requires screenshotting and loosely categorizing all the unique components that make up your user interfaces. While that’s a relatively straightforward endeavor, there are some important considerations to keep in mind to make the inventory as useful as possible. Let’s go through the process for creating a successful interface inventory.

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