Table Of Content
I’ve never met a person who isn’t feeling pressure to get work out the door, and this pressure naturally leads to focusing on the primary web project. Unfortunately, aggressive timelines and finite budgets detract from the effort required to make style guides happen, even when teams are committed to the cause. 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.
Implementing inclusive design: applying atomic design principles to navigational components
For example, a form label, input or button aren’t too useful by themselves, but combine them together as a form and now they can actually do something together. I wrote a book called Atomic Design that dives into this topic in more detail, which you can buy as an ebook.
Molecules
At this stage in the game the smaller patterns are already constructed, so all the template needs to do is pull them into the context of a page layout and give them unique names. The dingbat apartment house, ubiquitous in the Los Angeles, California area, was built between 1945 through the 1960s, and fused a purist style with googie influence. In design, the Atomic Age is the period roughly corresponding to 1940–1963, when concerns about nuclear war dominated Western society during the Cold War. Atomic Age design became popular and instantly recognizable, with a use of atomic motifs and space age symbols. In my recommended pattern, all navigational components are to have an underline on the hover state. In my refined link design, I have prioritised accessibility and readability by retaining the underline while strategically adjusting its placement.
Process & Workflow
Building on our previous example, we can take the homepage template and pour representative text, images, and media into the template to show real content in action. Organisms are relatively complex UI components composed of groups of molecules and/or atoms and/or other organisms. In chemistry, molecules are groups of atoms bonded together that take on distinct new properties. For instance, water molecules and hydrogen peroxide molecules have their own unique properties and behave quite differently, even though they’re made up of the same atomic elements (hydrogen and oxygen). At the template stage, we break our chemistry analogy to get into language that makes more sense to our clients and our final output. Templates consist mostly of groups of organisms stitched together to form pages.
Lacking a clear methodology
Templates are very concrete and provide context to all these relatively abstract molecules and organisms. Templates are also where clients start seeing the final design in place. In my experience working with this methodology, templates begin their life as HTML wireframes, but over time increase fidelity to ultimately become the final deliverable. Bearded Studio in Pittsburgh follow a similar process, where designs start grayscale and layout-less but slowly increase fidelity until the final design is in place.
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. This process of establishing defaults for dynamic data then replacing them with page-specific content continues for each section of the website. In addition to replacing simple strings like headings, we can also dynamically set variables to true or false, loop through an array of items, and more. We can even dramatically alter the UI with just a few changes to a JSON file, which we’ll talk about next. Atomic particles themselves were reproduced in visual design, in areas ranging from architecture to barkcloth patterns.
Pattern Lab isn’t…
But object-oriented thinking is weaving its way into other aspects of the web as well, including CSS, the styling language of the web. Methodologies like OOCSS, SMACSS, and BEM have cropped up to help web designers create and maintain modular CSS architectures. The spirit of modularity is weaving its way into every aspect of the web creation process and having profound effects on organizations’ strategy, process, content, design, and development.
He took inspiration from other industries, including chemistry and industrial architecture. There’s no doubt that Atomic Design can be a brand new approach to UX design. By encouraging a whole new way to look at components and their groups, designers can create an entire system that works in the long haul. One of the most powerful aspects of Atomic Design is that it allocates time to the creation of molecules in order to make sure that they have a clear meaning and function. This helps design teams be mindful of each component group, as well as the whole of the screen. Basic building blocks of matter, such as a button, input or a form label.
Mechanism driven design of trimer Ni1Sb2 site delivering superior hydrogenation selectivity to ethylene - Nature.com
Mechanism driven design of trimer Ni1Sb2 site delivering superior hydrogenation selectivity to ethylene.
Posted: Wed, 21 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Again, these specific instances influence how we loop back through and construct our system. Pages are the highest level of fidelity and because they’re the most tangible, it’s typically where most people in the process spend most of their time and what most reviews revolve around. Pattern Lab provides several ways to add pattern descriptions and annotations to a design system. Pattern descriptions can be added by creating a Markdown file that corresponds to the name of a pattern (e.g. pattern-name.md), which will show the pattern description in the library list view. We’re simply defining this object’s attributes and providing values for those attributes.
In the visited state, the link component will match the characteristics for default, hover, focus and active. For in-text links the link will be a different colour, indicating that this link has been previously visited. In the hover state, the weight of the underline will increase to 2px (0.13rem), and the tint of the underline will also increase to be the same tint as the link text colour.
With Atomic Design, designers can say the same about groups of components. Much like the design thinking methodology, Atomic Design has a certain framework that means to help designers organize their efforts and guide them in the design process. Like in design thinking, when taking the atomic approach designers aren’t meant to install a linear workflow. Instead, there’s plenty of back and forth so that UI design decisions are made with a sound basis in validation.
When looking at various patterns in a library, I’ve found myself wondering, “Great, but where is this component actually used? ” Defining and describing pattern characteristics is one thing, but there’s an opportunity to provide additional contextual information about your UI patterns. Pattern Lab provides the ability to view both a pattern’s underlying HTML and the template code used to generate the HTML. It can also be extended to showcase accompanying CSS and JavaScript code. Is baked into Pattern Lab, which means we can view our UIs and their underlying patterns across the entire resolution spectrum.
Branded content and campaigns designed to tell stories and start conversations. Transform napkin sketches into validated, transformative products and brands. The templates offer a great way to make sure that with each new screen, a certain coherence is kept. These templates can be implemented quickly as they are, or they can be adjusted if need be.
Salesforce’s Lightning design system, for example, shows a pattern’s HTML as well as all the (S)CSS pertaining to that pattern. These randomized values help designers and developers better consider the entire resolution spectrum rather than a handful of popular device dimensions. As a technical aside, Pattern Lab uses either PHP or Node.js as the engine that stitches patterns together and generates the pattern library. However, you don’t need to be a PHP wizard or Node guru to use Pattern Lab any more than you have to know how to build an internal combustion engine to drive a car. Moreover, your final website doesn’t have to be built with PHP or Node to use the tool, as Pattern Lab’s output is backend-agnostic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Atomic design doesn’t just make life easier for design teams and stakeholders — it makes sites better. And that’s a goal worth working toward, no matter how the landscape continues to change. The more you understand what makes users excited about your websites, the more you can refine the elements.
But dedicating a stage in the atomic design methodology to these relatively simple components affords us a few key insights. I’ll introduce techniques for design teams to get started with systematic design. One particularly useful technique is conducting an interface inventory. I’ll also reference other tools (like Stlyify.me and Nicole Sullivan’s Typo-O-Matic) that help deconstruct an existing interface into its component parts.
