You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved inside a different application before; then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. That’s a design pattern to you and me.
We’ve put together a list of some of the best places to find design patterns on the web. Now, whilst all of these resources are free some may ask you to pay for premium resources and the like; we just want you to know we are NOT affiliates of any other site and have no financial interest in you purchasing anything from anywhere else online.
UI – Patterns
We like UI Patterns; it makes it easy to find patterns that you like and to group them together once you’ve decided that something is useful. They also have a bunch of interesting articles on UI design patterns which can help extend the way you approach using patterns in your designs.
Author/Copyright holder: UI Patterns. Copyright terms and licence: Fair UseWELIE Interaction Design Patterns
WELIE isn’t the prettiest site we’ve ever seen but there’s a very useful interaction design patterns library which is logically grouped and incredibly helpful.
Pattern Tap
Pattern Tap is closing on 10,000 User Generated Sets of patterns and that makes it an awe inspiring resource for UI designers. The drop down menu system makes it really easy to find what you want in moments.
UI Scraps
The good, the bad and the ugly of UI design. UI Scraps is great blog which looks at interface design as a whole and then tinkers with the patterns used. You can find some great work here and some truly awful stuff too; it’s all thoroughly critiqued so you can see why something doesn’t work too.
Pattern Browser
Pattern Browser does exactly as the name suggests; it lets you quickly switch between UI patterns in your browser window. There aren’t as many patterns here as on some of the bigger sites but it’s a good resource nonetheless.
Author/Copyright holder: Pattern Browser. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.
User Interface Engineering
User Interface Engineering offers more than patterns, it’s a heavy resource that can meet a lot of your UI needs. The user and site generated commentary is invaluable.
Design Snips
Very nice graphical library of Design Snips for users to browse through and then put into play in their own UI work.
NPM
A nice collection of all the ingredients that you need to “bake” a website. NPM is a great source of inspiration and a lot of the patterns here are very good indeed.
Elements of Design
There are some handy groupings of design elements for use on Elements of Design. This goes a little beyond UI but that’s OK there’s plenty for the UI pro to use here too.
Web Design Practices
Web Design Practices has been around for a while but it doesn’t seem to get too many updates; there’s some very useful stuff here anyway.
References & Where to Learn More
Header Image: Author/Copyright holder: Jeremy Keith. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Course: UI Design Patterns for Successful Software:
https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/ui-design-patterns-for-successful-software
