456 Website Style Guide Resources
Examples
Real life pattern libraries, code standards documents and content style guides.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/carbon.png" />
Carbon Design System
By IBM
Carbon Design System is a series of individual styles and components, that when combined make beautiful, intuitive designs.
- frontend
- code
- patterns
- voiceandtone
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<img src="/images/screenshots/code-for-america.jpg" />
Code For America
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/http_codepen.io_guide_.jpg" />
Codepen's design patterns
The design patterns used in Codepen
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/css-guidelines.jpg" />
Harry Roberts's CSS Guidelines
By Harry Roberts
High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS
- code
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<img src="/images/screenshots/lonely-planet.jpg" />
Lonely Planet
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/mailchimp.jpg" />
Mailchimp's Pattern Library
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/mailchimp-voice-and-tone.png" />
Mailchimp's Voice and Tone
By Mailchimp
- voiceandtone
- writing
- designlanguage
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<img src="/images/screenshots/mapbox.png" />
Mapbox
An extensive guide featuring HTML and CSS patterns, a writing guide, and tutorials for implementation.
- frontend
- code
- writing
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/http_www.yellowshoe.com.au_standards_.jpg" />
Mark Brown's Standards Guidelines
By Mark Brown
To aid a shared understanding of front-end development best practice at PUP.
- code
- frontend
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<img src="/images/screenshots/quattromani.jpg" />
Max Quattromani
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/salesforce.jpg" />
Salesforce
- designlanguage
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/css-tricks.jpg" />
Sass Style Guide
By Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier’s personal style guide for writing Sass
- code
- frontend
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<img src="/images/screenshots/south-tees.jpg" />
South Tees Hospital
A style guide for an NHS hospital’s website
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/starbucks.jpg" />
Starbucks
- frontend
- patterns
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<img src="/images/screenshots/us-design-standards.png" />
U.S. Design Standards
Open source UI components and visual style guide to create consistency and beautiful user experiences across U.S. federal government websites
- frontend
- patterns
- code
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<img src="/images/screenshots/yelp.jpg" />
Yelp
- frontend
- patterns
Articles
Things people have written about style guides.
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A Maintainable Style Guide
By Ian Feather
An explanation of the principle’s behind Rizzo: Lonely Planet’s Style Guide
- living
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A living style guide for GOV.UK
By Edd Sowden, GDS
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Atomic Design
By Brad Frost
Atomic design is a methodology for crafting effective interface design systems.
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Creating Style Guides
By Susan Robertson
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Front-End Style Guides
By Anna Debenham
An introduction to Front-End Style Guides.
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Living Design System
By Sönke Rohde
How the Salesforce UX team built their cross-platform design system
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Pattern patter.
By Ethan Marcotte
Ethan Marcotte shares his thoughts about design patterns, and ways we can present them better in pattern libraries.
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Style Guide Best Practices
By Brad Frost
Tips for making your style guide readable, accessible, useful, and lasting.
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Styleguide & Boilerplate Patterns
By Tyler Sticka
Compares the range of patterns in different style guides.
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Systemic Design
By Federico Holgado
Federico Holgado of Mailchimp explains how modular design systems from other industries apply to constructing our own interfaces.
Books
Books written about style guides.
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A Pattern Language - Towns, Buildings, Construction
By Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel
A Pattern Language helps lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely.
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Atomic Design
By Brad Frost
Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. This book introduces a methodology for thinking of our UIs as thoughtful hierarchies, discusses the qualities of effective pattern libraries, and showcases techniques to transform your team’s design and development workflow.
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Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
By Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems.
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Designing Interfaces
By Jenifer Tidwell
By capturing UI best practices and reusable ideas as design patterns, Designing Interfaces provides solutions to common design problems that you can tailor to the situation at hand.
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Front-End Style Guides
By Anna Debenham
Learn how to create comprehensive style guides for the web, whether you’re starting from scratch or assembling one for an existing site.
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Frontend Architecture for Design Systems - A Modern Blueprint for Scalable and Sustainable Websites
By Micah Godbolt
This book takes experienced web developers through the new discipline of frontend architecture, including the latest tools, standards, and best practices that have elevated frontend web development to an entirely new level.
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Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, 2nd Edition
By Theresa Neil
This handy reference provides more than 90 mobile app design patterns, illustrated by 1,000 screenshots from current Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps.
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Web Anatomy - Interaction Design Frameworks that Work
By Robert Hoekman Jr., Jared Spool
Web Anatomy delivers a complete guide to using interaction design frameworks, an examination of the psychology behind major frameworks, and a thorough look at how frameworks will change the way you work for the better.
Podcasts
Episodes from various podcasts where style guides are discussed.
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Design process with Samantha Warren
Big changes in web technology are forcing us all to look at what many have been saying for a while — the web design workflow that was enshrined over the last decade really doesn’t work. The creator of Style Tiles, Samantha Warren, joins Jen Simmons to talk about workflows, design processes, and how new ideas about our tools can help us all better design websites for the modern age.
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Jeremy Keith on Everything Web
Jeremy Keith joins Jen to talk about Mobilewood, future-friendlying websites, responsive design techniques, digital preservation, html5 semantics, Firefox 7, and much more.
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Modular Design
Ethan and Karen explain how a modular design process that puts content modeling and design patterns first will help you.
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Starbucks
Starbucks considers mobile to be the first customer touchpoint. Lincoln Mongillo tells us why managing for “one web” forces them to focus on what’s important, and puts performance, accessibility, and security at the center of their design process.
- responsive
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Successful Product Design, pt. 4 - Atomic Design with Brad Frost
Brad discusses Atomic Design, designing systems, Pattern Lab, style guides, and why these are good practices.
Talks
Conference presentations about style guides.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/future-friendly-styleguides.jpg" />
Future Friendly Style Guides
By Luke Brooker at Web Directions
How style guides can help in a responsive design workflow.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/style-guides-are-the-new-photoshop.jpg" />
Style Guides Are The New Photoshop
By Stephen Hay at Fronteers 2012
Use of image editors for creating web design mockups has worked until now, but responsive design is forcing us to find alternatives, as we can’t simply create more mockups as we design for more screens… Let’s take a look at one of the most important aspects of this method: the creation of clear, semi-automated, self-updating style guides.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/styleguide-driven-development.gif" />
Styleguide Driven Development
By Matt Fordham at Seattle Interactive Conference 2014
Tools
Things to help you make your own style guide.
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Barebones
By Paul Robert Lloyd
An initial directory setup, style guide and pattern primer
- PHP
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Bootstrap
By Twitter
Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
- HTML
- CSS
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<img src="/images/screenshots/foundation.png" />
Foundation
By ZURB
Front-end framework created for developing fully responsive web apps.
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KSS
By Kyle Neath
Structured documentation for (pre-processed) CSS with generated live style guides
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KSS-node
By kss-node
A Node.js implementation of Knyle Style Sheets (KSS), “a documentation syntax for CSS”.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/patternlab.png" />
Pattern Lab
By Brad Frost and Dave Olsen
Create atomic design systems
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<img src="/images/screenshots/snack.jpg" />
Snack
By Snack
Library to give the ‘kick-off’ on a web project with Style Guide option included.
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Style Prototypes
By Sam Richard
Tool for creating pattern libraries and atomic design systems
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Style Tiles
By Samantha Warren
Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colors and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web.
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Web Fundamentals
By Google
A comprehensive resource for multi-device web development.
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<img src="/images/screenshots/web-starter-kit.png" />
Web Starter Kit
By Google
Google’s Web Starter Kit includes an HTTP server, responsive boilerplate, live reloading, and a component style guide.
Contributors
Resources on this site have been added by the following contributers:
<img src="/images/screenshots/carbon.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/code-for-america.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/http_codepen.io_guide_.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/css-guidelines.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/lonely-planet.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/mailchimp.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/mailchimp-voice-and-tone.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/mapbox.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/http_www.yellowshoe.com.au_standards_.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/quattromani.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/salesforce.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/css-tricks.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/south-tees.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/starbucks.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/us-design-standards.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/yelp.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/future-friendly-styleguides.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/style-guides-are-the-new-photoshop.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/styleguide-driven-development.gif" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/foundation.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/patternlab.png" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/snack.jpg" />
<img src="/images/screenshots/web-starter-kit.png" />