Atomic Design

What is Atomic Design ?

Atomic design is methodology for creating design systems.

There are five distinct levels in atomic desing:

1. Atoms
2. Molecules
3. Organisms
4. Templates
5. Pages

Below is the detals of each stage:

Atoms

Atoms are the basic building blocks of matter. Applied to web interfaces, atoms are our HTML tags, such as a form label, an input or a label.

Atoms can also include more abstract elements like color palettes, fonts and even more invisible aspects of an interface like animations.

Like atoms in nature they’re fairly abstract and often not terribly useful on their own. Hoever, they’re good as a reference in the context of a pattern library as you can see all your global styles laid out at a glance.

Molecules

Things start getting more interesting and tangible when we start combining stoms together. Molecules are groups of atoms bonded together and are the smallest fundamental units of a compound. These molecules take on their own properties and serve as the backbone of our design systems.

For example, a form label, input or button aren’t too useful by themselves, but combine them together as a form and now they can actually do something together.

Building up to molecules from atoms encourages a “do one thing and do it well” mentality. While molecules can be complex, as a rule of thumb they are relatively simple combinations of atoms built for reuse.

Organisms

Molecules give us some building blocks to work with, and we can now combine them together to form organisms.

Organisms are groups of molecules joined together to form a relatively complex, distinct section of an interface.

Building up from molecules to organisms encourages creating standalone, portable, resusable comonents.

Templates

At the template stage, we break our chemistry analogy to get into language that makes more sense to our clients and our final output. Templates consist mostly of groups of organisms stitched together to form pages. It’s here where we start to see the design coming together and start seeing things like layout in action.

Pages

Pages are specific instances of templates. Here, placeholder content is replaced with real representative content to give an accurate depiction of what a user will ultimately see.

The page stage is essential as it’s where we test the effectiveness of the design system. Viewing everything in context allows us to loop back to modify our molecules, organisms, and templates to better address the real context of the desing.

Why Atomic Design ?

In a lot of ways, this is how we’ve been doing things all along, even if we haven’t been consciously thinking about it in this specific way.

Atomic design provides a clear methodology for crafting design system. Clients and team members are able to better appreciate the concept of design systems by actually seeing the steps laid out in front of them.

Atomic design gives us the ability to traverse from abstract to concrete. Because of this, we can create systems that promote consistency and scalability while simultaneously showing things in their final context.