Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

The links

This week we’ll take a break from our traditional structure of separating out links for designer sand developers, and we’ll focus on a single theme. And there’s a quiz at the end that we’ll have a prize for.

Pattern Matching

In 1977 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein published A Pattern Language, a groundbreaking work in Architecture that has had a profound influence on not just that field, but Computer Science as well. Around a decade ago I thought and wrote quite a bit about pattern languages in relation to designing (and marking up) Web sites, and in the last couple of years, the rise of Style Guides (in essence types of pattern libraries) has seen these ideas increasingly influence how we design and develop for the Web.

So this week, a few of the articles and resources that have crossed my desk recently related generally to patterns and style guides (and so other random things I found interesting as well). By the way, we’ll be covering Responsive Style Guides at Respond in March.

A collection of Design Principles

The wonderful Jeremy Keith has collected an array of Design Principles, including those from the British Government Digital Service, Tim Berners Lee’s design principles for the World Wide, and many others.

Style Guide Best Practices

Brad Frost, who gave a workshop as part of last year’s Respond conference outlines his Best Practices for Style Guides.

Maintainable Style Guides

The Engineering team at Lonely Planet address the issue of how to build maintainable style guides. No point having them rot away in the corner.

Security anti-patterns

An often overlooked but very useful aspect of pattern languages is the idea of anti-patterns “a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive”. One such pattern that mobile UX guru Luke Wroblewski has long railed against is hidden passwords, particularly on mobiel devices. He details his argument here.

Patterns in Action

I’ve often weighed in on the native versus web apps debate (since 2008 as it happens), but one key distinction between these two kinds of experience could be characterised as a pattern, let’s call it the “Installation Pattern”. Let’s face it, installing native applications is a pain, and as long time Windows and Android developer Nick Bradbury observed recently, Mobile Apps are Scary to Install

Meanwhile, the folks working on Firefox OS have given a lot of thought to how web apps can be more easily “installed” on operating systems, with the concept of “pinned apps” (not to be confused with Internet Explorer’s concept of pinned sites introduced a few years ago).