Design Systems (Smashing eBooks)

functional patterns

To be most effective, interface inventories should be done regularly. Even if your team maintains a pattern library, new patterns will emerge that need to be folded into the system. If you get into a habit of running inventories every few months, each time shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. And every time you do it, you understand your sys

Ideally, everyone involved in the creation of the product should know what this element is: its name and purpose, why it’s been designed that way, and how and when it should be used.

When the teams at TED, Atlassian and Airbnb were asked about their design principles during interviews for this book, they were all able to recall them instantly.

Conduct an Interface Inventory

The main purpose of TED’s website can be captured in one sentence: “Spread the ideas as far and as wide as possible.” In terms of TED’s ethos and values, this means reaching as many people as they can, lowering the barrier to entry, and making the product inclusive and accessible. It means prioritizing performance and accessibility over flashy feat

Find Shared Themes If you’re still in the process of defining your principles, a useful exercise is to ask a few team members (or everyone, depending on size of the team) to write them down individually. What, in their opinion, does good design mean for your product? How would they explain it in five sentences to a new member of the team, in a way

A surefire way to end up with vague design principles is to have no idea who they’re for.

Functional patterns can be simple or they can combine to create more complex patterns. A recipe card is made of a meal title, image, ingredients, and an action button. Each module within the recipe card has its own goal: the title tells us what the meal is; the image provides a preview of the final result; ingredient icons allow us to scan the card