PatternFly News

Let’s elevate PatternFly design guidelines, the open source way

Join us on our mission to define, build, and maintain design documentation resources that best support you.

To our Flyers,

Whether you’re new to building with PatternFly components or you’re a well-seasoned pro, odds are you’ve consulted our design documentation to guide you in the right direction. We’re proud to create these resources the PatternFly way: By tapping into the wisdom and experience of our open source community.

At PatternFly, collaboration drives everything we do. Our design documentation is no exception.

A culmination of community voices come together to create our design guidelines. This creative convergence is a great testament to our open source roots — but open sourced documentation doesn’t come without challenges.

It takes a village to write and maintain our growing guidelines, and each unique voice brings unique insights, approaches, and writing preferences. From terminology to structure to organization, different contributors craft guidelines in different ways. Variability is one of open source’s many strengths and many charms.

But strong design documentation is actionable, findable, and usable: All characteristics born from consistency.

Over the past year, we’ve grown our UX writing style guide to help designers and developers write and design more inclusive and consistent user experiences. In 2021, we’re looking to elevate how we write and maintain our design guidelines so that they reflect those values, too.

It’s no mystery: Great design systems provide great support, and that support stems from strong documentation.

So how do we continue to celebrate PatternFly’s multitude of voices as we build a more consistent documentation experience? The answer lies in what makes PatternFly, PatternFly:

Open source it.

We’re launching an ongoing effort to streamline how we create, update, and maintain our design documentation — the open source way.

We’ll explore and expand our PatternFly content conventions to make each and every set of component guidelines more readable and intuitive, all based on community feedback from Flyers like you.

Robust documentation best practices support consistency. With consistency comes reliable content design patterns that PatternFly users can follow to navigate a more predictable and intuitive reading experience.

So it only makes sense that the path to streamlined documentation is one shaped by you; the designers, developers, researchers, writers, and community members who use it.

With your help, we’ll strengthen our design guidelines to be more useful and usable for Flyers just like you. We hope to tailor our documentation to your workflow so that you’ll spend less time searching and more time accessing the information you need to get the job done.

More consistent documents will allow you to easily scan for, find, and take what you need to empower your work across open source and UX.

We’ll work together throughout this content journey to:

• Conduct content audits, deep dives into existing guidelines to find and evaluate key content patterns, terms, and trends.
• Collaborate across content workshops, research, and discussions to share, test, and verify content to develop PatternFly best practices that best reflect the way you use our design documentation.
• Crowdsource content maintenance to update existing component design guidelines with those best practices based on research, testing, and community insights.

That’s where you come in.

We couldn’t possibly elevate our design guidelines without putting the spotlight on the Flyers who use them! Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it motivates us — we want to hear everything about how you read, use, and navigate PatternFly resources.

Where do you look first? How do you use design documentation in your day-to-day workflow? What kind of information do you prioritize as you build with PatternFly?

With nearly 80 component design guidelines and counting, there’s no shortage of work to be done — and no shortage of opportunities to be heard.

Workshops, community conversations, live design demos, content testing. We’ve got ample avenues for interested Flyers to share their own content experiences to inform, elevate, and inspire new ones.

Design documentation is a living, breathing part of the PatternFly design system. This collaborative effort will be, too.

Want to jump on board? Learn more about the project in last month’s kick-off presentation and fill out our Google form to get started.

We’re excited to learn, grow, and elevate our content with you. Here’s to streamlining PatternFly documentation experiences; brick by brick, letter by letter.

Looking forward,
PatternFly Team

Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.