This week our lecture was about Style Guides. In the PowerPoint presentation we learnt about style guides and pattern libraries. These elements will help me when creating my own brand.
Style Guide
A style guide is a design document which signifies the styles, patterns, practices and principles for a specific person or business. These standards may include the typography, logo/icons, colour palette, grammar which is based on its guidelines.
Pattern Library
A collection of design components related to the brand that appear multiple times on a website. Ui-Patterns.com defines the UL design patterns as “Recurring Solutions that solve common design problems.” Some examples of design components may include: Slideshows, Navigation, Social Media icons, New listings, hyperlinks, Carousels, etc. A pattern library document describes how a component behaves, looks like, and coded. Any organization must have interface patterns to digital products. Mailchimp, BBC Gel, Starbucks and Yahoo have examples of their own pattern in their pattern libraries.
Component
A Component often referred to a reusable pattern. Components are interactive elements e.g buttons, links for creating a user interface. These are available for Android, IOS, the web and Flutter.
Daniel went into depth about the pattern libraries, managing code and Style guides. We must keep these elements consistent. He shared plenty examples on the following slides of style guides and pattern libraries and showed a few links to websites on the slides where we can find more information and examples which we can check for some further inspiration.
In terms of own style guides it is important we consider the following:
- Establish a table of contents.
- Break information into manageable chunks
- Use plain English and explain things clearly.
He then went on to talk about Modern Tools such as style tiles, Element Collage and Interface Inventory. He shared examples with us and use of these helps keep the interface consistent.
For this week he asked us to complete a interface inventory on specific website as well creating an element college on our own brand which I will add to my blog and finally ensuring my own research blog is kept up to date.