The 2013 blog post from Brad Frost is still a great introduction to Atomic Design”. There he provides the main concepts behind it and the raw definition: Atomic Design is a methodology to build design systems. Although Brad is very clear and you can feel his enthusiasm in his writing - the text misses addressing the big picture (which Brad provides amazingly well in his book). And you may end up with more questions than answers after reading it.

Looking at the raw definition, the first question mark popping up is: if Atomic Design helps to create design systems. What are design systems? Design systems are guidelines for design decisions. And they can take multiple forms as style guides for Brand identity, Design language, Voice and tone, and many more (if you are curious you can check “Design systems save the day”).

Still, I would think there is still a big question hanging above us: why does it all matter? Atomic Design and design systems are embedded in a much larger discussion about “how to organize the cross-disciplinary field of web design & development in an efficient way”. Efficient here means to keep consistency across multiple platforms: consistent UI, consistent user experience, consistent brand identity, and maintaining all the characteristics of good software. Quite a challenging task and one that design system and Atomic Design came as a model and a tool (respectively) to address.

The core abstractions

The Atomic Design provides a way to organize your UI library around five different abstractions that escalate in levels. They are (1) the atoms, (2) the molecules, (3) the organisms, (4) the templates, and (5) the pages.

Starting with the atoms, Brand set the atoms as the building blocks. Mostly that translates to the HTML tags like the periodic table shown below.

The atoms in the web design & development field2

The molecules are atoms held together to perform one simple task. Brad defines it as molecules “do one thing and do it well”. Examples would be a search field or media object containing an image and a description.

Organisms are groups of molecules that stand alone under the same umbrella. One classic example would be an “app bar” that contains molecules like a search field, a menu, and a media object with a profile picture and name - they all came together to form this reusable and portable component.

App bar as an organism example4

When templates arrive, Atomic Design scapes the field of chemistry metaphors to the more familiar names. Brad makes the argument that the closer to the final product, the close we are to people from outside development - like other departments from the company or any other stakeholders. And coming to a more common vocabulary may facilitate communication.

A template is a generic view of a type of page. And finally, the page is a specific instance of one template. The final two levels are much more familiar to web designers and developers.

Brad makes a really good point about the names and metaphors: they do not really matter, you can replace the names and metaphors for anything that makes more sense in the context you are developing. The core is the concept under these names.

Paradigm shift

Beyond these five levels, Atomic Design and design systems want to make a deep shift in how web design & development is organized. The goal is to stop thinking about developing pages and start to think about developing systems. So the workflow stops being focused on ad hoc changes in the UI that are really hard to document, maintain and keep consistent; and starts to be about more elaborated changes in the system that translates ultimately into the desired changes in the UI - but now in a much more consistent fashion.

Learn more:

Brad Frost book: https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/table-of-contents/

Laura Kalbag on Design Systems: https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/

Component Driven Development: https://www.componentdriven.org/

Written by Bruno Dias

What is Atomic Design for and why does it matter?