Table Of Content
Because of this, we can create systems that promote consistency and scalability while simultaneously showing things in their final context. And by assembling rather than deconstructing, we’re crafting a system right out of the gate instead of cherry picking patterns after the fact. Building up to molecules from atoms encourages a “do one thing and do it well” mentality. While molecules can be complex, as a rule of thumb they are relatively simple combinations of atoms built for reuse.
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But like atoms in the natural world, interface atoms don’t exist in a vacuum and only really come to life with application. If you want to run some workshops around design systems, you can also read “How to prioritize your design system components? By interlinking all of our components to each other, we also realize that if we create a new component, it’s the heart of the system that is going to be impacted, not just an isolated screen. It is thus essential to spend time designing this identity, thinking about what makes the difference, the uniqueness of a brand or a product. Yet again, we’re creating our molecule in its own file so that we can use it anywhere we need it.
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That means communicating designs or code to other teams suddenly causes a lot less confusion, making for less back-and-forth and fewer rewrites. In the above example, you can see a standardized template made up of atoms, molecules, and organisms organized to form a template. However, care should be taken not to enforce atomic design rules dogmatically. Finding the right levels of abstraction for components takes some iterative analysis and refactoring. Changing lower-level atoms/molecules automatically apply changes across an entire UI. More complex components comprise groups of molecules and/or atoms like headers, footers, lists, or menus.
Getting Started: Atomic Design System Basics and a Quick Tutorial
This type of thinking is certainly important, but I’m slightly less interested in these aspects of design because ultimately they are and will always be subjective. Lately I’ve been more interested in what our interfaces are comprised of and how we can construct design systems in a more methodical way. In interfaces, molecules are relatively simple groups of UI elements functioning together as a unit. For example, a form label, search input, and button can join together to create a search form molecule. In chemistry, molecules are groups of atoms bonded together that take on distinct new properties. In both the design and code, we can create and control the button in one place, and then reuse it all across our projects.
Rational design of Fe-M-N-C based dual-atom catalysts for oxygen reduction electrocatalysis - ScienceDirect.com
Rational design of Fe-M-N-C based dual-atom catalysts for oxygen reduction electrocatalysis.
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Structuring our work simplifies our solution, speeding up future changes, with fewer issues. Pages are very similar to templates in that they show an entire… well… page (who’da thought?). The difference though is that these pages are specific instances of templates with unique content on your site.
Templates: Using Prismic’s outstanding Dynamic Content
Because we’re starting with a similar finite set of building blocks, we can apply that same process that happens in the natural world to design and develop our user interfaces. Now, let’s take a tour of the content we’ve used in our components to see how our atomic design system can even extend into the content editing experience that a CMS provides. We’ll start with Prismic’s local developer tool, which helps devs connect their designs to the custom page builder they create. In the fast-paced world of design, where user experiences shape the success of digital products, having a systematic approach is paramount. At this stage, design teams will have templates that show the general patterns of the relevant pages. Product pages, search results pages, home pages and so on will all have their respective templates that show the content structure and general look for later use.
Atomic design components in UI design
Using concepts from chemistry in web design, most design teams find that their lives are made easier. This framework is all about seeing the interface and the components that make it up with brand new eyes, gaining perspective. The process itself often results in a system that lists all the components and patterns, like a design system that holds all materials and deliverables.
Advantages of atomic design
But ultimately we must step into language that is more appropriate for our final output and makes more sense to our clients, bosses, and colleagues. Trying to carry the chemistry analogy too far might confuse your stakeholders and cause them to think you’re a bit crazy. Now, assembling elements into simple functioning groups is something we’ve always done to construct user interfaces. But dedicating a stage in the atomic design methodology to these relatively simple components affords us a few key insights. Let’s see how our template gets modeled for the CMS in the Custom Types tab. Any product moves atom by atom, gradually building up to molecules, organisms, templates, and pages that work cohesively.
Once we have a molecule, like our previous signup form, what happens? It might be tempting to look at each screen as a single organism, but that would be taking away some of the power in Atomic Design. Instead, this framework encourages us to look at each page as several organisms that together, create the interface. Atomic design gives us the ability to traverse from abstract to concrete.
Building up from molecules to organisms encourages creating standalone, portable, reusable components. A client might not be terribly interested in the molecules of a design system, but with organisms we can see the final interface beginning to take shape. We must create systems that establish reusable design patterns and also accurately reflect the reality of the content we’re putting inside of those patterns. Pages are specific instances of templates that show what a UI looks like with real representative content in place. Building on our previous example, we can take the homepage template and pour representative text, images, and media into the template to show real content in action. The result is a simple, portable, reusable component that can be dropped in anywhere search functionality is needed.
Let's look at a React component example to see atomic design in practice. We'll implement a common SearchForm component using lower-level atoms and molecules. Build components to be as reusable as possible between sections of the app. Extract any duplicated component logic into reusable atoms/molecules. Determine which components are atoms, molecules, and organisms based on complexity, reusability, and composition. One of the consequences of this great control over the UI components is that coding is made much easier on the developer team.
Though every page has a template, not all templates are alike, and sometimes, a duplicate template generates an entirely different page experience. It is the consumer-facing part that exhibits your brand and shows off all your hard work. Atomic design combines the creativity of design with the practicality of science. It is based on the book of the same name by Brad Frost, and it explains a web design framework. He urges designers to view web pages as living systems rather than a collection of stagnant pages.
A header organism might consist of dissimilar elements such as a logo image, primary navigation list, and search form. We see these types of organisms on almost every website we visit. Dan is the founder of Skyward, where he and his team deliver great user experiences to teams around the world with the Jamstack. He also shares insights about his journey to building a successful agency on Twitter, @dan_spratling. And once you start seeing websites as a collection of smaller components, you’ll find it a lot easier to create far more complex features, while keeping them maintainable in the long term. By having a design system in place, you start to unify your terminology, which makes talking about the parts of your website easier.
These simple UI atoms can then be combined into more complex reusable components. When having a design project that is done in the Atomic Design way, most teams find themselves with a design system that they created, sometimes, without even knowing it. Because of the importance that Atomic Design places in each small individual component, a style-guide is assembled as each atom is carefully chosen. Taking a look at the different types of content needed, the team can use the organisms to structure the entire product. This is done based on how the different organisms and the content relate to each other, resulting in the skeleton of the product – like a low-fidelity wireframe. At this point, the concepts of information architecture and visual hierarchy become very important.
If atoms are the basic building blocks of matter, then the atoms of our interfaces serve as the foundational building blocks that comprise all our user interfaces. These atoms include basic HTML elements like form labels, inputs, buttons, and others that can’t be broken down any further without ceasing to be functional. Inspired by molecular makeup (have you forgotten your high school chemistry?), Brad Frost realized that building blocks in websites could easily be described in a similar way. In the same way that atoms build into molecules which build into organisms, the smallest components of a web design come together to form more complex components. These are valid questions, considering we’ve been building user interfaces for a long time now without having an explicit five-stage methodology in place.
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