Sunday, April 28, 2024

Atomic Design: A Comprehensive Guide by Artur Ryhus

atomic design system

Octavio has been involved in projects designing user interfaces from concept to launch for the past six years. As a designer, you need to know the atomic design system to make your work easier and reduce the time and effort invested into designing drastically. Designers successfully develop a brand when they create design languages that consumers recognize across products.

Atomic design systems + Prismic = 🚀

Atomic design lets us dance between contexts like the painter Frank so eloquently describes. The atoms, molecules, and organisms that comprise our interfaces do not live in a vacuum. And our interfaces’ templates and pages are indeed composed of smaller parts.

Design Systems: From Atomic Design to a Global Solution

When a brand must communicate across so many varied touchpoints, speaking in a unified, consistent manner becomes critical to a brand’s success. Modularity has long been a staple principle in the world of computer science, as we discussed earlier. While this principle existed long before the web was invented, it has taken some time for modularity to become engrained in the minds and hearts of web developers. Publishing content for the Web used to be a fairly straightforward endeavor, as the desktop web was the only game in town. Today, our content is consumed by a whole slew of smartphones, dumb phones, netbooks, notebooks, tablets, e-readers, smartwatches, TVs, game consoles, digital signage, car dashboards, and more. If I had a quarter for every time I heard some stakeholder declare “We’re trying to be more agile,” I’d be orbiting the earth in my private spacecraft instead of writing this book.

Understanding the basics

That means communicating designs or code to other teams suddenly causes a lot less confusion, making for less back-and-forth and fewer rewrites. A molecule is a collection of atoms that combine to create a group of repeatable elements. This is where we start to see things come together for specific uses, but these can often be swapped out for another molecule without any significant impact.

Looking at the chemistry definition of an atom will explain that it is the quintessential building block of matter. Frost describes the atoms of web design as aspects that, if taken away, everything else would lose context and fall apart. Now that we understand the concept of atomic design and its five levels, it’s time to talk about how to implement it in practice. Atomic design is not just a theoretical concept, it can be applied to real-world projects and has been successfully used in various industries. Everyone’s design process is different, so I’ll also discuss how to introduce and integrate atomic design into cross-disciplinary Web design teams. I’ll also provide practical advice for getting buy-in from colleagues and clients.

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The Netflix website follows a simple grid layout that helps users navigate their options. A color palette includes all of the colors that your design team will use in a project. Doing so will make it harder for designers to understand the intended aesthetic. By using the atomic approach, designers keep track of every single atom they begin with and document each instance that each is used to create a larger being or organism. Service design can help our organizations innovate customer experience and build brand loyalty — and it’s great for small businesses.

atomic design system

There’s still room for developers to go rogue and write sloppy, incongruent code—which is why some organizations have gone above and beyond to establish incredibly sophisticated design systems. Companies like Lonely Planet have achieved the holy grail of pattern libraries, which is to say their pattern library and production environment are perfectly in sync. We’ll discuss the holy grail in more detail in chapter 5, but it’s worth bringing up in this section to demonstrate how that affects the code exposed in the context of a pattern library. Rather than offering HTML and CSS, Lonely Planet’s Rizzo style guide surfaces the include code for teams to pull in the appropriate UI component. Atomic design is a powerful methodology for creating design systems.

There are a plethora of tools and methods for creating and maintaining design systems, but often the best tools are the ones we are most familiar with. Sketch and Atomic Design are a powerful set of tools and methodologies designers can use to create design systems that allow for standardization and a more efficient workflow. Templates are the glues that combine the different organisms or individual sections to create a complete design.

Defining a page is as equally important as atoms and molecules when building a design system. You can test atomic components in isolation without having to look for outside dependencies. This makes testing easier to conduct and issues quicker to pinpoint. Bugs can be fixed at the component level rather than having to debug the entire interface design. If you haven’t already incorporated some form of atomic design at your company, this is your introduction to it and hopefully your inspiration to start thinking of reusable components.

Equipped with the established patterns and organisms, designers have to put it all together to create the general content structure of the pages that will form the entire product. A brand book must be supplemented with the styling guidelines — a set of important directions to help avoid chaos in development and organizational aspects. The availability of the styling guidelines promotes consistency and integrity of the user interface. Such guidelines facilitate further product development all around, set the structure and confines for proper product performance, and help avoid all sorts of misunderstandings. Based on how atoms form molecules and molecules include organisms, you might have guessed that organisms formulate templates.

The book will conclude by recapping why thinking in a more systematic way is becoming increasingly necessary. I’ll talk about the merits of atomic design, and remind people how they can get started. Right now, for me the most obvious challenge is to make systematic design the default mode of thinking for designers, agencies, and organizations.

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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. In addition to demonstrating the final interface as your users will see it, pages are essential for testing the effectiveness of the underlying design system.

In order to work with a design system, you need to develop a brand book that would define the unique attributes of your brand. The modular nature of the system allows us to distribute responsibility for each part of the interface and promote the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). A crucial task here is to make sure the resulting interface looks and runs equally well across a range of devices, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, PCs, TVs, gaming consoles, etc.

It doesn't only make the entire designing environment more efficient and but also speed-up the product building process. Similar to this, Trello also has a design system, called Nachos. This includes components, styles, and measures to identify what is aligned with the tone voice of Trello and what is not.

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