Atomic Design by Brad Frost Make and Maintain Great Design Systems
Table Of Content
Similarly, our content should be aware of the manner in which it will be presented. The close relationship between content and design requires us to consider both as we construct our UIs. My search for a methodology to craft interface design systems led me to look for inspiration in other fields and industries. Given this amazingly complex world we’ve created, it seemed only natural that other fields would have tackled similar problems we could learn from and appropriate.
Design systems
Scaling a design system for a telecommunications giant - TELUS
Scaling a design system for a telecommunications giant.
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Designer Samantha Warren developed design artifacts called style tiles, which demonstrate color, type, and texture explorations in a nice encapsulated one-pager. Designer Dan Mall built on Samantha’s idea with a concept called element collages, which demonstrate design atmosphere explorations in an exploded collage of interface elements. The page metaphor has served its purpose helping users familiarize themselves with the web, and provided creators with the necessary transitional language with which to create for a brand new medium. But to build thoughtful interfaces meant to be served to a multitude of connected devices, the time has come for us to evolve beyond the page. A well-crafted design system caters to the content that lives inside it, and well-crafted content is aware of how it’s presented in the context of a UI. The interface patterns we establish must accurately reflect the nature of the text, images, and other content that live inside them.
Supporting the Project
At the beginning of the sculpting process, the artist and their patron have a general idea of what’s being created, but that vision won’t be fully realized until the sculpture is complete. The visual designer has already disappeared into the night by the time the front-end developer picks the design off the floor. With one glance at the composition, a strange feeling—some combination of bewilderment, rage, and dread—washes over them.
Pattern Lab
As it happens, there are many flavors of style guides, including documentation for brand identity, writing, voice and tone, code, design language, and user interface patterns. One of the best features of the atomic design is that it helps in creating user interfaces where the design of every single element gets attention. Following the basic design principles, this approach ensures that all the UI elements are created with a single objective in mind.
Most of the examples I could find about React/Redux applications (either client side or universal) are very simple…
Detailing all the different technical strategies and considerations around the holy grail would necessitate its own book, but let’s cover a few important areas around keeping front-end code in sync. “Atomic design” as a buzzword encapsulates the concepts of modular design and development, which becomes a useful shorthand for convincing stakeholders and talking with colleagues. Ultimately, whatever taxonomy you choose to work with should help you and your organization communicate more effectively in order to craft an amazing UI design system. For the TechCrunch project, we created a comp for the article template only after the client was feeling good about our element collage explorations.
In search of an interface design methodology
Establishing a culture of communication early in the process will increase the likelihood of the design system taking root. Creating a useful design system should be the team’s first priority. Building a happy home to contain it all might not happen straightaway, but should become a bigger priority once the design system becomes official. Making a good-looking style guide isn’t just design for design’s sake; it reflects an organization’s commitment to making and maintaining a thoughtful, deliberate design system. A well-crafted style guide can help manage all these moving parts and ensure the many perspectives that influence each pattern are properly documented in the style guide. Make the pattern library accessible to every discipline, and think about how to make it easy and inviting for different disciplines to contribute to the documentation.
Have each participant spend five or ten minutes presenting each UI category to the group. I’m incredibly happy with the way the book turned out, and if I had to do it again I’d do it exactly the same way. I took preorders of the ebook from Day 1 of the project, and those preorders financed the copy editing, print production, and ebook production. It was a bit of a leap of faith, so I’m really pleased the process went as smoothly as they did.
Design language
Without thinking of broader audiences, style guides may come across as too vague or too technical, which can intimidate other disciplines and lead them to believe these resources aren’t for them. A maintenance and governance strategy is critical to style guides’ success. Style guides will be thrown in the trash (right beside all those PSDs and wireframes) and abandoned without a proper strategy in place for who will manage, maintain, and enforce them. This auxiliary project conundrum reminds me of sentiments I often hear around factoring accessibility into projects. They say, “Oh, we wish we had the time and budget for accessibility, but…” The notion that accessibility (and other principles like performance and responsiveness) is a costly extra line item is a fallacy.
Remya Ramesh, Experience Design Lead, OpenCities - GovInsider
Remya Ramesh, Experience Design Lead, OpenCities.
Posted: Wed, 14 Dec 2016 08:00:00 GMT [source]
The overall idea is to give specific attention to the basic building blocks of any design system, i.e. the small UI components that combine together to create complex designs. The U.S. government’s design system – called the Draft U.S. Web Digital Standards – is a collection of UI components and visual styles created to help people making government websites build more consistent UIs. The design system provides markup and styles for users to download and weave into their applications. It would certainly be amazing to see a holy grail design system implemented at such a gigantic scale, but as you might imagine, that’s a pretty tall order. The vastness and decentralized nature of the organization means that a synchronized pattern library isn’t really achievable without some dramatic restructuring of how federal government websites get built.
I’ll also provide practical advice for getting buy-in from colleagues and clients. After all, your lowly author is a web designer, which is mainly the reason this book primarily focuses on web-based interfaces. But it’s important to understand that atomic design applies to all user interfaces, not just web-based ones. For as long as I’ve been talking about atomic design, I’ve had people proffer alternate names for the stages of the methodology.
At regular intervals the artist steps back to see how their detailed work affects the overall sculpture. This process continues until the sculpture is complete and everyone is pleased with the results. The sculptor starts with a giant slab of rock and starts chipping away.
If a person’s name were to wrap onto five lines within the pattern, we would need to address that broken behavior at a more atomic level. We must create systems that establish reusable design patterns and also accurately reflect the reality of the content we’re putting inside of those patterns. When we pour real representative content into Time Inc.’s homepage template, we’re able to see how all those underlying design patterns hold up. Organisms are relatively complex UI components composed of groups of molecules and/or atoms and/or other organisms.
This is where the atomic design system proves to be one of the best approaches. Given that the process workflow is standard with the end goal of each phase being well-defined, designers and other professionals can work together to achieve the final design. The atomic design system is a unique framework to create reusable designs and ensure robustness in systems. Many organizations have developed smart modular systems that are more responsive to change using the concepts of atomic design. When it comes to the design of modern websites or mobile applications, a framework like this can add immense value to the design process. The atomic design system not only ensures increased collaboration but also gives the designers a chance to focus on the small details that might otherwise be overlooked.
Once the UI/UX designers have created the required templates, the next task is to give life to these templates by populating them with the actual design elements. This is what leads to the final product that the target audience can interact with. At this point, the atomic design system moves a little away from chemistry, and a little close to the biological world. Molecules, in this design system, combine to create organisms that can perform a complete function, having all the necessary elements. A navigation molecule may join the user profile molecule to create the header of a dashboard. In fact, it is just one part or section of it that needs to be linked to other organisms.
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