Brad Frost — Atomic Design

Brad Frost is the web designer who created the mental model of Atomic Design. He’s a sought-after designer, speaker, and consultant about responsive design. His new book Atomic Design explains the concept of modular design as well as how to position it in a workflow for multi-device web developers.

• SVG Summit — A full-day, virtual UX design conference on SVG that you can attend online on February 15th. Free recordings with registration at SVG Summit. Use discount code NONBREAKINGSPACESHOW for 20% off.


• CSS Dev Conf — Conference dedicated to CSS and its super friend technologies like JavaScript, Sass, NPM, and more. A limited supply of Early Bird Tickets go on sale soon. Register now!


• UX Design Newsletter — A weekly free newsletter containing a collection of tutorials, articles, and videos about frontend design and development, plus tips on how to bring better engagement to the multi-device world curated by Christopher Schmitt.


• Feed.Press — Hosting and feed support provided by Feed.Press. Sign-up today and try FeedPress on a 14-day trial (no contracts or commitments). Use promo code NBSP during checkout to get 10% off your first year.

• Brad Frost


• Brad Frost on Twitter


• Brad Frost’s blog post on Atomic Design


• Dave Olsen on Non-Breaking Space Show #86 talking Pattern Lab


• Bootstrap


• Foundation


• Pattern Lab


• Brian Muenzenmeyer


• Lamp Stack


• Pattern Lab


• Tiffany & Co.


• Artifact Conference


• Shopify


• Brad on GitHub


• Atomic Design on Github


• DeployBot


• The book, Atomic Design, free online version


• Buy Brad’s Frost Atomic Design book


• Ron Popeil


• Owen Gregory

Jump to a conversation on…

• 3:10 Introduction


• 3:40 Brad describing Atomic Design


• 5:01 5 Distinct stages of UI


• 8:02 Organisms and hierarchy of a webpage


• 10:40 Introduction of pattern lab


• 12:30 Pattern lab is really plain, you have to bring your own vision, it’s a workspace


• 16:16 UI Auditing, consistency and patterns of website forms


• 18:02 How to introduce people to change and convince them that change is good


• 21:04 Communication with boss, don’t ask permission because boss only cares about end result


• 23:30 We’re already doing things like Pattern Lab - we just need to be more aware of it.


• 24:35 Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness after.


• 27:01 Don’t need to go vertical for approval, talk with your colleagues


• 29:01 29:30Example of how responsive experience works


• 30:03 Approval by way of conversion instead of convincing


• 31:30 Working without boss approval to make a bank site responsive


• 33:01 Page concept is out of date and from process standpoint doesn’t serve it’s use


• 34:20 Keep language the same, call it a webpage, but make website an ecosystem not a printed page


• 37:05 Keeping things above the fold


• 38:03 Using open source for writing the book and book deployment


• 41:45 Contributions to the book from others


• 45:19 How to find the book


• 48:15 Ending the interview with thanks