Open Source
A UX content designer’s guide to PatternFly
Writing guidance and best practices for UX writers
PatternFly is an open-source design system that provides a collection of reusable UI components, design guidelines, and visual styling options to help developers and designers save time and effort while creating sleek, functional, and consistent user interfaces.
But designers and developers aren’t PatternFly’s only users — guidance is also available for content designers. Here are some resources that content designers can use PatternFly to improve readability and consistency in whatever project they’re working on.
1. UX writing guidelines
PatternFly’s UX writing section is chock-full of guidance around writing. Whether you’re looking for the best way to punctuate a message, the standards for communicating time, data storage, or currency; or just looking for some best practices to abide by, PatternFly has it all. While PatternFly’s writing guidelines are based on Red Hat design conventions, they’re universal enough for anyone to use. That’s the beauty of PatternFly, after all — everything can be adjusted to fit the needs of your product.
2. Component design guidelines: Content considerations
Each of PatternFly’s components have a design guidelines tab that highlights component variations, structure, and usage. Note that we don’t call them “visual design guidelines”. That’s because — you guessed it! — these guidelines also apply to content designers. Drill down to the content considerations section of each component’s design guidelines to read about best practices for specific components.
3. Demos and react demos
To write microcopy that seamlessly guides users through your UI, you first need to understand how components work. PatternFly’s HTML and React demos can help you develop a deep understanding of each component and get a feel for how users will interact with your product. Many components have HTML demos, React demos, or both to demonstrate use cases for more complex component variations. PatternFly also has demos that illustrate how you may combine multiple components to achieve things like dashboards, filters, and composable menus.
Are we missing any key information for content designers and UX writers? If you think something’s missing, let us know by opening a new issue in the patternfly-design repo. Alternatively, learn more about how you can contribute to PatternFly.
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