Greetings! First of all, thanks so much for your interest in Atomic Design. And if you preordered the book, thanks a million. By preordering the book you’re helping fund the eventual print version of the book, and helping me focus on making this project the best it can be. It means the world to me to have your support, so thanks again.

Last week became a bit of a whirlwind after I announced the project, and the response so far has been tremendously encouraging. I’m super excited to dive into writing, but first I’d like to share how I’ve been setting things up.

The Atomic Design Website

This past week I’ve been getting a lot of infrastructure in place, including setting up the Shopify store, this mailing list, and the book’s website.

Jekyll

The website is running Jekyll, a static site generator with some smarts behind it. One of the main reasons I chose Jekyll is that I could author the book’s manuscript using Markdown, which easily can be converted into HTML but also later down the road be converted into e-book formats.

Github and Dploy.io

The site’s code is hosted on Github, and every time I push an update the repository, the site is automagically deployed to atomicdesign.bradfrost.com using a service called Dploy.io. This beats the pants off of having to manually FTP updates to the site. Deploy warns you about deploying automatically to a production environment, and while I can see why they want you to tread lightly, I’m doing it anyways. Guess I’m just livin’ on the edge.

Pattern Lab

Last week was focused on getting the basic site launched, but I still have a few important tasks to complete. Brian Muenzenmeyer, who runs the node port of Pattern Lab, shared his article about how he’s keeping Pattern Lab and Jekyll in sync. Needless to say, I’m super excited at this prospect and am hoping to accomplish something similar as I set up the pattern library for this project.

Resources

Throughout the writing of this book, I’m going to share resources and articles about atomic design, style guides, pattern libraries, process, and more. Today I’m actually just going to share one resource, but it’s a doozy of a resource!

Styleguides.io is a resource site dedicated to all things related to style guides and pattern libraries. It features tools, examples, resources like articles, podcasts, books, talks, and more. Over the past few weeks myself, Anna Debenham, Brendan Falkowski, and others have been making the site and have been seeding it with resources. So if you have have a resource to add to the site, please do! You can submit via Github or via the online form.

Progress and Next Steps

I started chipping away at the book’s outline and starting to sketch out Chapter 1, which focuses on our multi-device Web and the need for design systems. While I still have some infrastructure issues to sort out, but I’m excited to transition my focus more on writing over the next few weeks.

I’m using a project hub to track the project’s progress, which means you can follow along with updates here.

If you want to support the project, you can preorder the book here for $10 if you haven't already. And 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!