Articles (119)
Things people have written about style guides.
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A Maintainable Style Guide
An explanation of the principle’s behind Rizzo: Lonely Planet’s Style Guide
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A living style guide for GOV.UK
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Atomic Design
Atomic design is a methodology for crafting effective interface design systems.
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Creating Style Guides
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Front-End Style Guides
An introduction to Front-End Style Guides.
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Living Design System
How the Salesforce UX team built their cross-platform design system
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Pattern patter.
Ethan Marcotte shares his thoughts about design patterns, and ways we can present them better in pattern libraries.
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Style Guide Best Practices
Tips for making your style guide readable, accessible, useful, and lasting.
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Styleguide & Boilerplate Patterns
Compares the range of patterns in different style guides.
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Systemic Design
Federico Holgado of Mailchimp explains how modular design systems from other industries apply to constructing our own interfaces.
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29 Well-Designed Online Style Guides
Illustrative examples to demonstrate important facets of any online style guide
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49 Web & UI Style Guides of Famous Online Brands
49 web & UI style guides of famous online brands.
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50 Meticulous Style Guides Every Startup Should See Before Launching
A look at 50 stunning and detailed examples of style guides.
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A Sass Architecture for Scalable Frontends
A rock solid Sass architecture for scalable frontends and the work in a team.
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A framework to create an accessible and harmonious color system for faster design-dev handoff
Enabling design & development teams to use colors deliberately for improved consistency across product
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A style guide is a powerful management tool
A style guide will give you a common language for designers, developers, product managers, marketing and external agencies.
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An In-Depth Overview Of Living Style Guide Tools
Living style guides help front-end developers transform front-end code bases into well-described pattern libraries with the minimum of effort. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools — so let’s have a closer look at what our community has to offer.
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An extract from Designing Atoms and Elements
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Anchoring Your Design Language in a Live Style Guide
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Applied UX Strategy, Part 3 - Platform Thinking
The author discusses a systematic approach to designing product user experiences.
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Atomic Components: Managing Dynamic React Components using Atomic Design — Part 1
How we can apply Atomic principles to interface components.
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Automating Style Guide-Driven Development
Style guides come in many forms and shapes, but this article concentrates on style guides that are generated directly from the style definition sources — i.e. CSS and its modern variants.
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Behind the Design, The New Viget
A write-up on how Viget created their style guide
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Behind the Scenes - The Brand Bible
The author discusses nclud’s establishment of a brand bible, an actual physical reference to set parameters and guidelines.
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Beyond the Styleguide
An evaluation of modular design and the role style guides can play in acknowledging presentational and programmatic concerns.
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Breaking Through the Limits of Brand Style Guides
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Build a Style Guide Straight from Sass
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Building a Visual Language - Behind the scenes of our new design system.
A behind the scenes look at Airbnb’s new design system.
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Building our first pattern library
The team at FutureLearn rewrote their pattern library using atomic design principles and shared the process they used to make it happen.
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Building the GOV.UK Design System
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Buttons in Design Systems - 12 Tips for Setting Up a System That Endures
The author discusses the 12 lessons learned when working the primary button, secondary buttons, and a whole host of other button types in an emerging system.
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CSS Style Guides
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Chameleon - Building our living styleguide
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Clarifying our “Style Guide” Nomenclature
The author differentiates the tools used to create a standardized, consistent UI.
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Color in Design Systems - 16 Tips for Setting Up a System That Endures
16 lessons the author has learned while stabilizing a primary palette, tint and shade choices, secondary palettes, and solving for accessible contrast.
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Common Patterns in Styleguides, Boilerplates and Pattern Libraries
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Content And Display Patterns
Every element on the screen needs a Content pattern and a Display pattern applied to it. Embracing the difference in pattern types is the key to making a modular design system infinitely more scalable.
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Creating A Living Style Guide: A Case Study
This is the story of how FamilySearch developed a living style guide and the mistakes they made along the way.
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Creating a Design System Language
A look at how a product can benefit from having a living, breathing design language.
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Creating a Killer Style Guide
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Creating a Living Style Guide
Using a living style guide to drive development has many advantages including code efficiency and UI consistency. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about planning your style guide, creating pages and documenting stylesheets. -
Creating a type style guide
Susan Robertson explains the process of making a style guide for the typography on Fifty-Three’s marketing website.
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Design Systems Newsletter
This is a curated publication full of interesting, relevant links related to design systems.
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Design Systems: Building for the Future
A case study of how MediaTemple approached their design system.
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Designing Modular UI Systems Via Style Guide-Driven Development
The author explains that in order to implement a modular UI system, designers and developers should approach design in a modular way by using a style guide-driven development.
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Designing Products That Scale
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Designing in a Modular Way
Explore the concepts of modular design and their application to user interface design. Learn how you can create designs in a modular way and how you can use a living style guide to aide the process. -
Designing the Shyp Web Experience
Article describing the process of recreating a design system for new Shyp product targeted on businesses.
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Do I really need a style guide?
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Don’t Overlook These 7 Website Style Guide Sections for Your Team
7 style guide sections — with real examples — that might have slipped your mind.
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Finding our way with a Co-op design system
Useful look at how the Co-op design and build things.
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From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone
To help others adopt pattern thinking, we came up with an exercise for everyone involved in the pattern library.
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Front End Style Guides: Your Questions Answered
Anna Debenham answers questions about front-end style guides.
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Front-End Dev guidelines
TMW frontend guidelines for developers
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Front-End Style-Guides: Definition, Requirements, Component Checklist
Front-end style-guides help efficient design and testing, and enforce UI consistency. NNGroup present 8 style-guide requirements and 25 common components.
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Future Friendly Style Guides
How to build future friendly style guides
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Getting Started With Pattern Libraries
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Getting Started with PatternPack
Get startd with PatternPack. You can build and document your interface patterns, and then share the versioned code across multiple applications.
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How Clearleft built Code for America
Clearleft and Code for America explain how they created an accessible, consistent site for the US non-profit.
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How To Be More Organized While Designing UI
The author discusses how creating a systematic approach helped organization while designing user interfaces.
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How To Create A Living Style Guide
A tutorial that looks at the details of creating a living style using DocumentCSS.
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How building a design system empowers your team to focus on people — not pixels
First in a series about HubSpot Canvas.
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How designers can use unit testing to build resilient and happy design systems
The author discusses how unit testing helps to build efficient design systems.
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How to Build a Design System with a Small Team
Useful round-up of resources on building Design Systems for smaller teams.
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How to Develop a Living Style Guide
The article takes you through 5 easy steps to build highly reusable and maintainable components for a living style guide.
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How to build a living style guide (+ a free template)
The essential guide to build a style guide. -
How to create a design style guide - 25 pro tips
A style guide shouldn’t read like the work of a control freak, but nor should it be vague and ambiguous. Paul Wyatt explains how to strike the right balance.
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Identity style guides from around the world
Useful, regularly updated collection of brand style guides
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Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides
Vitaly’s coding techniques to help make CSS more maintainable
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In Search of a Living Design System
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Instacart’s Lead Product Designer on Creating A Design System
Initialized Capital frequently get asked about how startups should create style guides that define the brand identities of their companies, and so wthey asked Instacart’s Lead Product Designer, Jordan Staniscia, to share some lessons with portfolio companies this week.
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Intro to Style Guides
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Keeping your ever-evolving brand consistent: the digital style guide
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Living Style Guide Tools In-depth Overview
Living Style Guides are here to help us transform our Front-end codebase into well-described pattern libraries with minimal efforts. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools, so let’s have a closer look on what community has prepared for us.
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Modern Style Guides for Web Design and Development
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On Design Systems - Sell The Output, Not The Workflow
The author discusses how selling the output of a design system can be more beneficial than selling the workflow.
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On Pattern Portfolios
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Our CSS/Sass Project Architecture and Styleguide
Our approach to CSS architecture, a code styleguide and pattern libraries.
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Our Living Style Guide (Writing maintainable HTML/CSS)
An explanation of the principle’s behind Rizzo: Lonely Planet’s Style Guide
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Our story - Building a component library
Creating a component framework for the City of Gothenburg and the challanges of moving towards a modular UI design methodology
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Patterns Beyond Context
Design patterns never exist in isolation, they are always part of a greater whole. They are informed and shaped by their context, but also by content and contrast.
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Prendre des conventions en CSS et les documenter
This article talks about taking conventions and shows introduction to styleguides (with an example). (Article in French, about to be translated into English soon).
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Product Design Unification Case Study, Mobile Web Framework
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Product Design Unification Case Study, Part 2 - “Burger-Driven” Framework
A case study on systemizing and unifying visual and interaction design for an entire product line.
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Requirements for Website Prototypes (and Design Systems)
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Responsive Deliverables
Dave Rupert introduces the need to deliver “tiny Bootstraps for every client”. “Instead of delivering one PSD per page or worse, one PSD per responsive view, we should be thinking about deliverables as modular pieces of the larger system. Whether they’re based on strategy, components, or layout, they should all be built with extendibility in mind.”
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Retiring pieces of a design system
How to replace or remove things without breaking the build
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Setting up a Living Styleguide in Jekyll
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Snyk's Style Guide
How Snyk’s style guide was built using KSS.
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Style Guide Driven Development - A How To Guide To Improve your Development Workflow
Style Guide Driven Development lays the groundwork for building more scalable and maintainable applications while providing a common place for communicating among developers, designers, and stakeholders.
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Style Guides - 50 Shades of Corporate Blue
Mike shares his lessons learned from several attempts at evolving a style guide and convincing non-technical teams of its value.
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Style-Guide-Driven Development - the new web development
An overview of style-guide-driven development and how it relates to agile development and modern web development practices.
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Style-Guide-Driven Development - the new web development
Process changes are much more profound then the technology that enables them. If you ignore blog posts about technology for a moment, you may notice that the entire way we plan and build websites is being turned upside-down.
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Styleguide Driven Development
Styleguide Driven Development (SDD) is a practice that encourages the separation of UX, Design & Frontend from Backend concerns. This is achieved by developing the UI separately in a styleguide.
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Styleguide Generator Roundup
An opinionated comparison of popular styleguide generator tools.
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Sweat the Small Stuff. The importance of page-level content and your style guide
Short text items, such as field labels, section titles, and button names—while not lengthy—are extremely important and should not be created hastily. By incorporating these smaller items into your company style guide, you’ll promote consistency for readers and speed the creation process.
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Taking Pattern Libraries To The Next Level
Techniques and strategies to establish a pattern library that will be actively and consistently used by an entire team.
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The Harmony of UX Design Language Systems
The author discusses what a UX design language system is and why it is good for a brand, users, and business.
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The Language of Modular Design
Fantastic article on pattern libraries, collaboration, and language.
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The Marvel Styleguide
A look at the problems Marvel were trying to solve and what they wanted to achieve with their new style guide.
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The Salesforce Team Model for Scaling a Design System
Detailed look into the Salesforce team model for scaling a design system.
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The “Living” Style Guide - Pattern-Lab
BigCommerce’s approach to building a pattern lab.
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Thoughts on Atom Building in the Pattern Library
Thoughts on the thinking process around the building of atoms for a pattern library.
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UX Style Guides & Pattern Libraries the Easy Way
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Ultimate Guide to Designing Brand Guidelines
Useful look at how brand guidelines relate to style guides.
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Using Guidelines to Mind Your Tone
In this article I’m going to discuss why you need tone of voice guidelines, what to include, how to ensure they are used and refer to plenty of examples of existing guidelines from some well known organisations. This article assumes that you have already identified what tone of voice is most appropriate for your organisation.
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Using Pattern Lab to Design, Build and Maintain a Website
Brian Muenzenmeyer explains how he’s using Pattern Lab and Jekyll to simultaneous build and maintain his site and style guide.
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Using Style Guide Driven Development
Learn how you can use Style Guide Driven Development in your development workflow. Learn about the process, along with examples and compelling arguments to get you and your team on board. -
Using a Pattern Library as a Design Tool
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Visual design explorations
Paul talks about some of the different ways Clearleft have been doing out design explorations, including style tiles and element collages.
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Voice, Tone, and Style - The Whys, Wheres, and Hows
A guide to voice and tone style guides
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Voice, Tone, and Style: The Whys, Wheres, and Hows
Why you need a voice, tone and style guide and how to create one
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What is a design system?
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Why and How to Test Your Pattern Library
Strategies for testing pattern libraries and a tutorial for using Galen Framework to test a Pattern Lab project.
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Words are hard - Building a style guide at Slack
A look at how Slack are building a style guide to cover their brand voice & tone.
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Writing an Interface Style Guide
Ever designed or developed a beautiful interface only to find your hard work ruined months later by gaudy graphics or invalid markup? With proper documentation you’ll have a better chance at seeing your interface stay beautiful. Jina Bolton guides us through the process of developing an interface style guide.
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Yelp's got style (and the guide to back it up)
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Your Style Guide's Missing Something - and It's Big
The author explains the importance of things that he rarely sees in brand style guides: voice, tone, and editorial guidelines.
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“Leanify” Your Startup Design With Style Guides
Heidi Pungartnik provides some insight on how style guides are beneficial for startups, and provides tips on what to include in your own style guide.
