At An Event Apart today, Brad Frost announced the release of “The Style Guide Guide,” a boilerplate template for building style guides for design systems. It’s a terrific starter kit, cribbing the information architecture we’ve found to be most successful in our work on big enterprise design systems.
The Style Guide Guide imports and displays design-pattern HTML from a separate pattern library. Anytime there’s a change in the underlying code of the patterns, the style guide picks it up—always up to date. From there, The Style Guide Guide mixes in your documentation, usage guidelines, and design principles. Because those are entered in Markdown, it’s easy for a whole team to contribute documentation and guidelines, with a very low technical barrier to entry
Brad, Dan, Ian, and I have been using The Style Guide Guide alongside Pattern Lab in our last few design-system projects. It’s proven to be a highly collaborative environment for creating and sharing a design system. (Stay tuned, Brad promises a blog post to walk you through the integration with Pattern Lab, very cool.)
