Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.
The videos are coming! The videos are coming!
Here’s the first one: Laura Elizabeth opening the show at Patterns Day.
Ah, the age-old question!
The Venn diagram here pretty much maps to how I think about these different terms, and how they relate to one another.
Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!
Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.
How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?
Alla’s book is going to be a must-have (I know because I’ve been reviewing it as she’s been writing it). Pre-order it now. It’s out in September.
Beautifully designed and typeset eBooks of royalty-free works—yours for the taking and reading.
There’s a styleguide if you want to get involved on the production side too.
A style guide for voice interfaces.
A quick visual guide to CSS Grid properties and values.
If you want to understand the thinking behind this style guide guide, be sure to read Brad’s style guide guide guide.
It’s a short list, but this brief guide for coaches at Codebar is packed with excellent advice for anybody getting into teaching or training:
- Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary.
- Encourage the students to type and not copy paste.
- Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.
I like it when organisations share their in-house coding styles. This one from Springer Nature not only has guides for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but it also has a good primer on progressive enhancement.
If we describe patterns also in terms of content, context, and contrast, we are able to define more precisely what a specific pattern is all about, what its role within a design system is, and how it is defined and shaped by its environment.
A comparison of a few different tools for generating pattern libraries.
Spoiler…
In this particular case, Fractal comes out on top:
It has the features we need, and I’m happier than I should be with how simple the directory and file structure is. The documentation has also been super helpful thus far. We’ve customized it with our client’s branding and are ready to roll.
Having spent half a decade encouraging people to make their pattern libraries public and doing my best to encourage openness and sharing, I find this kind of styleguide-shaming quite disheartening:
These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router.
If a pattern library is intended to inspire, then make it inspiring. But if it’s intended to be an ever-changing codebase (made for and by the kind of people who enjoy configuring a router), then that’s where the effort and time should be concentrated.
But before designing anything—whether it’s a website or a pattern library—figure out who the audience is first.
A resource for American citizens put together by former congressional staffers. If you’re a US citizen wondering how you can resist Trump’s agenda, this should provide solid advice on what action you can take.
Anna has just published a lovely new version of her excellent little book on pattern libraries. EPUB, MOBI, and PDF versions are yours for a mere $8.
The styleguide, design principles, and pattern library for British Airways. It’s the “global experience language” for BA …so it’s called BAgel.
This quick dip into Fractal was in last month’s Net magazine.
It’s very gratifying to see how much Fractal is resonating with people—Mark has put so much hard work into it.
A nicely-documented styleguide from Atlassian. It’s not a component library, though—there’s no code here.
Alla looks at a few different ways of organising the contents of a pattern library, based on her experience with the FutureLearn team.