Tune Up Your Design Process

Automating your design process can ensure it continues to run smoothly as you scale. But is taking a pit stop to recalibrate your systems the best way for you to shave time off your designs?

- Tom May

Once upon a time, the word ‘automation’ conjured mainly negative connotations in the mind of the professional web designer. It made you think of programmatic software that generated cheap but badly coded sites for those who couldn’t afford the services of a web designer. Or perhaps the sort of basic service you yourself would offer a cashpoor client, using a pre-built Word Press or Drupal template.

But today all that’s changing. The automation of web design is not just important to clients at the lower end of the food chain. It’s increasingly relevant to those at the upper end too.

That’s because in a world where the biggest companies are increasingly design-driven – think Airbnb, Uber or Deliveroo – the digital services needed to keep today’s global consumers happy now far outstrip the capabilities of the single designer or small team crafting individual, bespoke pages.

And as clients demand bigger and more complex solutions, there’s been a rise in the popularity of component libraries and design systems, bringing an element of automation into the design process and helping it scale.

If you’re a small web shop working mainly for small businesses, this may not have impacted on you… yet. But with no way of knowing where your clients, your career or indeed society as a whole is going next, it’s still a trend we all need to know about. So we’re examining where the automation train is heading and when might be a good time to jump on board.

Pattern libraries

The simplest form of automation in web design is the pattern library. Also known as the component library or pattern language, it’s essentially a collection of reusable UI elements that make up a website. These may include, for example, form inputs, buttons, spans, navigation bars, image sliders, related links and social-media features.