Holy smokes! It's been a while. Remember me? In case you're wondering why you're receiving this email, it's because you signed up to receive updates on the progress of Atomic Design.
This year has been a whirlwind of business travel. I was on airplanes 12 consecutive weeks a bit back, and I've been away from home over 100 days so far this year. I was hoping to do a lot more writing while traveling, but I ended up bouncing around between preparing/giving talks & workshops, and being generally exhausted.
So while I'm tempted to apologize for my absence, I'm not going to do that. Balancing all of life's obligations is tough, and you can't do everything all the time. BUT! That being said I'm excited to say I'm making progress on the book and am looking forward to sinking my teeth into the rest of the book over the coming weeks.
Whoooooaaa we're halfway there
I've never been much of a Bon Jovi fan, but the good news is that the draft of Chapter 2 is complete, which means the book's manuscript is halfway done.
Chapter 2 defines the atomic design methodology, which consists of 5 distinct stages working together to create interface design systems. The 5 stages of atomic design are:
Chapter 2 defines each of these stages and how they allow us to concurrently build our final UIs and their underlying design systems.
In addition to explaining the benefits atomic design provides, I take some time to explain that atomic design can be applied to all user interfaces, not just Web-based ones. As an example, I show what Instagram's UI looks like with atomic design applied to it:
I think it's important to explain how atomic design is for UIs rather than for CSS or JavaScript architecture. A lot of people seem to be confused by that, so I wanted to clear things up. I went into further detail on the topic on my blog.
What's Next?
Chapter 3 is next on the agenda, which will focus on tools for making atomic design systems happen. I'm going to talk about what goes into making an effective style guide/pattern library. I'll be using Pattern Lab as an example, but the concepts will apply to any style guide tool you happen to choose.
Resources
The last time I wrote a newsletter, I introduced the Style Guide Podcast which is hosted by Anna Debenham and myself. Well! All these months later, we've interviewed 12 amazing guests that were able to share absolutely amazing insights into how they create and maintain style guides.
Anna and I aren't planning on doing anymore interviews for the podcast, but I'm hoping we can chat one last time to discuss what we learned from the podcast. In the meantime, definitely give the episodes a listen!
Until next time!
You can follow along with project updates here. And if you would like to support the project (and haven't done so already), you can preorder the book here for $10. If you have any questions or have any feedback for me, feel free to contact me via email or on Twitter.
Thanks again for supporting Atomic Design!
