You must have heard about Atomic Design in the recent times and how it is revolutionising front end development process with more refined and efficient approach. Let’s start with ‘What led to development of Atomic Design methodology?’ – A need to have robust design system which can help development of complex and scalable user interfaces.
So basically, a design system is an assemblage of the reusable elements, defined by set of rules, which can be put together in infinite possible combinations to build intuitive applications. Design systems are meant to provide consistent user experience and visual language throughout the product even if different members are working on different modules and workflows.
Atomic Design considers all the attributes of the ideal design system and provides powerful design system while ensuring easily understandable system. It is based on components inspired by Chemistry which include Atom, Molecule, Organisms, Templates and Pages. Just like all matter is made up of atoms, atoms combine to form molecules, molecules make up more complex organisms.
Let’s see some important reasons why you should consider Atomic Design for your next development project.
Atomic Design helps you design site with predefined and reusable atoms which include basic elements like HTML tags, colour pallets, buttons etc. which gets used for different parts of the site, reducing the possibility of writing duplicate code.
For example, if you are using atomic design for your web application and as per your branding guidelines you are using ‘green buttons’ though out the entire site. So wherever buttons are required, you just copy and paste of that particular code wherever and your work is done. Similarly, you can use any element and accelerate the development. Besides, this becomes easier with number of tools and libraries that help developers with ready to use atoms.
Core of the ‘Atomic Design’ lies into reusing atoms – basic components so that multiple layouts can be created while reducing efforts to write code again and again. With Atomic design system, it’s easy to combine different basic components –atoms, molecules etc. to create various webpages that perfectly match your requirements without putting much efforts into it. And, if you don’t like it or it doesn’t serve the intended purpose then it’s very easy to rearrange the components. Simple as ABC!
Branding guidelines are necessary to create identity and establish easily recognizable approach to communicate with existing and prospective audience.
Web applications or sites created with ‘Atomic Design’, atoms, molecules are created in the initial phase (even with set of defined standards or without them) and serve as tools to maintain branding guidelines and consistent designs.
Code written in Atomic Design is much simple to understand as it is created in conventional approach and facilitates not only development process but also support, maintenance and upgrades of the website.
As the layouts are built with set of basic components it’s easy to see and comprehend the code. Not to mention this is helpful in explaining the code to beginners as well.
In Atomic Design you will be having all the atoms, molecules – basic components at your disposal even before starting the development. That means you can create prototypes/mock-ups quickly and easily to present it to management, investors or just to check the viability of the designs.
All you’ve to do is to combine the atoms to create the webpages.
Atomic Design is a boon for development of big projects as it helps in breaking down the complex projects into basic components, it serves the purpose and helps a lot by allowing simultaneous development from different team members working from different locations. This will not only improve the output quality but also prove to be time efficient.
Speak to our front end development experts to learn how you can build more efficiently. If not, you can browse through our front end development services and find out more about our methodologies and latest front end development practices.
