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Let’s be clear from the outset, this isn’t an article about plaid, gingham or the craze that sweeps the Wickedweb studio every Friday, checked shirts – but rather an exploration into the design patterns which you and I have both come to recognise and seamlessly use and/or interact with – from forms to slideshows to navigational tools, instinctively we will probably know what to do.

First of all, what is a design pattern? Well, put simply, a design pattern is a recurring solution to a common problem.

Unlike rifling through your wardrobe of a morning, a design pattern saves time for both a website user and the designer. A recognised pattern reduces confusion allowing a user to continue along their journey, and can be implemented by a designer to solve similar problems. In a recent article on here, we looked at form design and the associated patterns within this field (pun very much intended). The patterns of form design are fairly well known and you need only read the article to see commonality and best practice – it is fairly easy to pick out a poorly designed form that ignores the common patterns – opting instead for a double denim outfit from the 1980’s.

However, just with your favourite striped vintage cotton loons, there comes a time when we need to be ready to wave goodbye to our tried and trusted patterns and look to something new and exciting, like a wild neon herringbone.

If you’re using Google Chrome right now, cast your eye up to the area where you would usually open up a new tab. Depending on your version, you may or may not see a small ‘+’ sign in the tab. At the turn of the year, Google removed this ‘+’ from the tab amidst much outrage from its community and cited its own internal reports which suggested users preferred the new ‘cleaner’ look.  Is this the birth of a new, better pattern, or just a pointless rejection of an old one? I wonder how many of you even noticed the slight change at all.

Thankfully, design patterns are not as fickle as the catwalk, but it does feel as if we are at a time when, with browsing technology developing almost exponentially, we can’t afford to simply follow the pattern and lazily pick out familiar, striped trousers. Instead of incrementally improving a solution, a pattern, sometimes we need to create a new one, a better one because our tried and tested methods are going to get left behind by gesture based controls. In the same way that the printed page cannot simply be transported onto our screens, pout 24” widescreen monitors cannot be shrunk down into a palm sized, touch-screen viewing screen and retain the same patterns and be expected to work as effectively.

As designers, we need to be wary of scrapping existing patterns simply to be purple leather clad revolutionaries, but we must also look at ways to better them amidst our changing landscape and greet challenges with an open mind and a willingness to explore new thinking. Breaking a rule is OK if we can come up with something better.

It is an exciting journey, some patterns will stick and stand the (relative) test of time until the next shift, and others will become the Global Hypercolour T-Shirts of the digital age, but it is time to refresh our digital wardrobe.

A few useful logs of design patterns:

http://ui-patterns.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

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