Atomic Design

Style guides demonstrate to clients, stakeholders, and other disciplines that there’s a lot of really thoughtful work going into a website’s design and development beyond just “Hey, let’s make a new website.” A pattern library communicates the design language in a very tangible way, which helps stakeholders understand that an underlying system is determining the final interface. Style guides can help alleviate what I call special snowflake syndrome, where certain departments in an organization think that they have unique problems and therefore demand unique solutions. By exposing the design system in the form of a style guide, these special snowflakes can better appreciate consistency and understand why their requests for custom designs receive pushback.