Design for Software: A Playbook for Developers

Chapter 12: Design Patterns

“If it ain’t broke . . .”

BY NOW YOU have all the tools you need to start creating great-looking, highly usable software. Hopefully the world of digital design is a little clearer now than before you picked up this book. And even if you aren’t quite ready to start laying down pixels, you can impress your friends with your newly learned design vernacular and ability to spot fancy ampersands. If you stayed with me through the whole book, you should be proud of yourself; you covered a lot of ground. You learned some basics like how to take user insights and turn them into apps people actually want to use. You also dipped a toe into some deep concepts like how to calculate a vertical rhythm for maximizing text readability. And you even went beyond the screen and explored some interaction design principles.

In this last chapter, I want to leave you with a collection of design patterns. These patterns are a hodgepodge of interaction, visual, and miscellaneous patterns that can be mixed and matched to create your own original designs. The reason I’ve grouped them into the interaction design section of this book is because a familiar design is inherently a usable design. In other words, leveraging established design paradigms will improve your design, making it more understandable and reliable.

One thing that really characterizes an interface designer versus a traditional designer is the ability to recognize and leverage successful UI idioms and repurpose ...