Brad Frost
Web designer
Style Guide Best Practices
We’re tasked with creating experiences that look and function beautifully across a dizzying array of devices and environments. That’s a tall order in and of itself, but once you factor in other team members, clients, stakeholders, and organizational quirks, things start looking downright intimidating. With so many variables to consider, we need solid ground to stand on. Style guides are quickly proving to be foundational tools for tackling this increasingly-diverse web landscape while still maintaining your sanity. Style guides promote consistency, establish a shared vocabulary, make testing easier, and lay a future-friendly foundation. This session will detail best practices and considerations for creating and maintaining style guides, so you can set up your organization for success.
65. BRAND STYLE GUIDES
๏ Purpose: establish guidelines for using core brand assets
๏ Audience: the entire organization, vendors and anyone
making use of brand assets
๏ Can include: Logos, typography, color palette, file templates,
assets, downloads, etc
71. DESIGN LANGUAGE GUIDELINES
๏ Purpose: establish a design language for cohesive user
experience across a suite of products and services
๏ Audience: anyone creating user experiences for the
organization, mostly designers
๏ Can include: design principles, brand overlap, aesthetics, ux
principles, motion, etc
77. VOICE AND TONE GUIDELINES
๏ Purpose: establish and encourage a cohesive, appropriate
tone across the entire user experience
๏ Audience: content creators and editors, anyone writing copy
for the brand
๏ Can include: interface copy, marketing, documentation, blog
posts, legal, alerts, etc
84. WRITING STYLE GUIDES
๏ Purpose: establish and encourage a cohesive writing style
across all properties
๏ Audience: content creators and editors, anyone writing copy
for the brand
๏ Can include: grammar, proper content structure, general
writing best practices
95. CODE STYLE GUIDES
๏ Purpose: establish code standards for teams to write more
cohesive, efficient, and maintainable code
๏ Audience: front-end developers, back-end developers, 3rd
party developers, summer interns, developers developers
developers
๏ Can include: development principles, HTML structure
guidelines, CSS architecture, syntax, best practices, JS style
and best practices, backend language syntax and best
practices
103. PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Purpose: establish and maintain an effective interface
design system to create consistent UIs, speed up
production, and create a watering hole for the team
๏ Audience: anyone touching the project: designers,
developers, project managers, product owners, etc
๏ Can include: global elements, typography, image types, lists,
navigation, blocks, media, animations, literally anything you
include in a UI
109. Consistency is one of the most powerful
usability principles: when things always
behave the same, users don't have to worry
about what will happen. Instead, they know
what will happen based on earlier experience.
-Jakob Nielson
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-web-design/
110. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
111. We just copied and pasted a pattern, changed a few
things, and in twenty minutes we had built a
system that was responsive; it looked great on
mobile and it was nice to look at. [The status page]
was one of those pages that not a lot of people will
see. We call them the dark corners.
-Federico Holgado
http://styleguides.io/podcast/federico-holgado/
112. By having a pattern you could actually use
that's already 95% of the way there, it brings up
the quality of everything so those dark corners
actually aren't so dark any more.
-Federico Holgado
http://styleguides.io/podcast/federico-holgado/
113. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
๏ Better workflow
114. Mostly designers will come up with rough
representations of where things might live without
going into too much detail because there's no
longer a need to do that work up front and we can
just tweak it in the browser afterwards.
-Ian Feather
http://styleguides.io/podcast/ian-feather/
115. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
๏ Better workflow
๏ Creates a shared vocabulary
116. It is the common ground that designers and
developers are all seeking…and I find that a
style guide is really effective at providing
that common ground.
-Lincoln Mongillo
http://styleguides.io/podcast/lincoln-mongillo/
117. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
๏ Better workflow
๏ Creates a shared vocabulary
๏ Easier to test
118. It makes what you change in production a lot
more easy to manage over the long term; you're
able to debug things more effectively. You're
able to have a view into how your code base is
looking across a site versus having various
artifacts show up across hundreds of pages.
-Lincoln Mongillo
http://styleguides.io/podcast/lincoln-mongillo/
119. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
๏ Better workflow
๏ Creates a shared vocabulary
๏ Easier to test
๏ Useful reference
120. BENEFITS OF PATTERN LIBRARIES
๏ Promotes UI consistency and cohesion
๏ Faster production
๏ Better workflow
๏ Creates a shared vocabulary
๏ Easier to test
๏ Useful reference
๏ Future-friendly foundation
139. ๏ Documents your interface design patterns
๏ Points out inconsistencies
๏ Helps get buy-in from organization
๏ Establishes scope of work
๏ Is the genesis of a shared vocabulary
๏ Lays the groundwork for a future pattern library
INTERFACE INVENTORY
140. AND IF THE BOSS STILL SAYS NO,
DO IT ANYWAYS.
141. You just sneak it in. It's what I'm going to do to
make the quality of the work better. And I don't
have to say it. It starts in the sales process. You
just build enough budget so that you can do it. You
don't have a conversation about it, it's just par for
the course. You don't have to ask permission.
-Dan Mall
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/unfinished-business-episode-105-seventeen-coats-of-bullshit
142. IN ORDER TO MAKE THE WHOLE,
YOU NEED TO MAKE THE PARTS.
169. WHAT PATTERN LAB IS
๏ A design system builder
๏ Your comprehensive interface design system
๏ A style guide starter kit
๏ A design toolkit (viewport resizer and other tools)
212. Putting a style guide off to the end or
treating it as a separate thing is just asking
for it to just sort of die on the vine or become
outdated and obsolete.
-Jina Bolton
styleguides.io/podcast/jina-bolton
228. When you start to place these kinds of
assets behind constraints, many teams
either take an outrageously long time to get
access, or they never get access.
-Nathan Curtis
http://styleguides.io/podcast/nathan-curtis
232. Companies are using their style guide as a
testament to what their belief system is
and also an indicator of the quality of
their organization; they're essentially
using it as a recruiting tool.
-Nathan Curtis
http://styleguides.io/podcast/nathan-curtis/
233. When I saw Salesforce’s style guide I
thought it was beautiful and it's why I
wanted to join this team.
-Jina Bolton
styleguides.io/podcast/jina-bolton