Design Patterns refers to the compositions and design layout of a product, and differentiating the design patterns to adapt to mobile, desktop, or tablets. Despite responsive designs, there are a range of specifications and ideals in comparison to a desktop or a mobile device.
It is recommended and a buzz word to start with ‘mobile first’, to design to a smaller screen and scale. This basis helps build screen design and unfold bigger changes and adaptions, as well as ensuring popular demand of preferred device is designed for.
Architect Christopher Alexander first mentioned pattern designs in his book ‘ A Pattern Language’ in 1977. Design patterns and interactive design go beyond style and visual repetition, it is merely visual resolutions and software design that encourage a remarkable work flow of adapted design.
A direct quote from Christopher Alexander that depicts a reasonable explanation of pattern design reads as follows “ Each pattern represents our current best guess as to what arrangement of the physical environment will work to solve the problem presented.” As designers in a space, it is our environment that adapts our ideas into reality and functionality.
Summary
- Due to high demand and readily available design sites for business’, designers, artists, or architects, etc, UI Pattern Proliferation represents a huge growth of identical design patterns for websites, layouts and social sites.
- Identical design patterns are popular due to a common way of understanding and interpreting the internet. There are certain layouts that allow audiences to consume such information or content in a effective and informative way, due to display, layout and interactivity. Examples of common design pattern properties are:
- The Hamburger Menu (allows space on screen, designed by Norm Cox, easy navigation for audiences.)
- Account Registration (used to create a flow of process and progress, allows a carefree way to keep track of steps)
- Long Scroll (great for story telling on websites, apple watches and simple navigation)
- Card Layouts (pioneered by Pintrest, presents information in chunks and helps scanning and rearranging information easily, provides simple and straightforward titles, content and pictures.)
- Hero Images (high definition images to grab audiences attention, allows a simple representation to identify content or product to audiences.)
- Animation (commonly used to enhance site storytelling, and to add an element of interest and interactivity to a site, there are large scale animations with parallax scrolling and pop ups notifications, or there are small scale animations with spinners and hover tools or loading bars that don’t require any user input.)
- Navigation & Menus Animation (hidden navigation menus are very popular to save screen space, hover navigation gives an intuitive feel and gives instant visual feedback; usually used for desktop, laptops and tablets.)
- Gallery & Slideshow Animations (used to add large sums of content imagery in interesting and interactive displays, used especially by photographers for portfolios.)
- Motion Animation (add intrigue and attention, as audiences are attracted to motion.)
- Scrolling & Background Animation/Videos (creates audiences interaction and adds depth to websites to represent content and an essence of aesthetic design.)
- Material Design (introduced by Google in 2015, used with shadow effects, movement and depth concepts to create design that’s more realistic to the user with clean and aesthetic design.)
- Responsive Design (very popular due to mobile usage and design, usually minimalist to keep website size low, and create structure and flow of the design on a range of products.)
- Flat Design (compatible with minimalist design, material design and responsive design, as its patterns are used for simplistic and aesthetic design concepts.)
Reflection
There are endless possibilities to approaching design patterns to emerge your desired product vision. There are countless layouts that have already been adapted and tested to be successful in the interactivity and response of a product, this is due to popularity of preference, especially mobile phones; most product would be adapted to suit a mobile layout first, then adapted for other devices. Design patterns are important to follow to ensure productivity of a product, meeting trends and audiences expectations. Following pattern designs also ensures skills and knowledge to appropriately plan and design a product.
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