Atomic Design

Brad Frost, Chapter 3

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Tools of the Trade

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The pattern library serves as a central hub of UI components.

It promotes consistency and cohesion, better collaborative team workflow, shared vocabulary, better accessibility testing, helpful documentation and a foundation for the future. 

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First things first, a pattern lab is a site generator to build atomic design systems. It is there to help things stitch together like color patterns, fonts and styles for headings and subtitles. 

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Brad Frost compares this topic to Matryoshka 

dolls. It is also compared with the previous chapter's discussion about atoms to molecules to organisms to templates. 

This way, the pattern lab speeds up workflow.

It works by creating a basic standard pattern that saves a lot of time with team members so they can work with it. This is obviously not the final result however. 

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The Pattern Lab is just a guide to help. It can swap in real content into templates. Another situation is that it can help with creating scenarios in the website and addressing them in an appropriate way. 

At the end of the day, it all depends on the person using it. Maintaining a successful design system is important for a company's future.

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