Chapter 3. Using style tiles to communicate design
This chapter covers
- What a style guide is and why it’s important
- The importance of meaningful client deliverables
- Introduction to style tiles
- Building a style tile
Interior designers use swatches and fabric samples to create a palette to work from. This is an important part of the process; painting and furnishing a room is costly in materials and labor, so setting the color and style ahead of time can help to minimize those expenses.
Style guides function in much the same way, enabling clients to decide on a palette and theme before the hard work of drafting the front end of a website begins. This is important in responsive design, because the website requires a lot of moving parts. Every design element needs to be scalable, flexible, and natively built in CSS in order to maintain a small load burden and efficient architecture.
In order to bridge the gap between mobile, tablet, and desktop sites, you need to visualize the design of a site without implying dimensions, size, or format. Style guides give you the ability to abstract your design and break it into manageable chunks.