Design Patterns

last updated in 1999, this site appears to be Tidwell's site while doing her graduate work (she went on to write the seminal Designing Interfaces book). Still an amazingly well done and valuable resource on design patterns.

a wiki that accompanies the great book Ajax Design Patterns. As one would expect, this site focuses on design patterns related to Ajax and web applications. Quite comprehensive and technical documentation of the patterns.

this site is kind of a mess but appears to have a wealth of examples to explore.

not a pattern library per se, but more a study in how not to do error messages and dialogues in web apps and rich client apps.

Illustrations from the book Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski, Wroblewski, Luke. 2008. New York: Rosenfeld Media. www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/

Reuse, recycle, but don't reinvent the wheel unless necessary. by Brian Christiansen at UI Engineering. Via. This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web.

a good place to look for web design patterns. Allows you to create your own collections. One can also search designs by color and vote on particular designs.

a collection meant to accompany Morville's book "Search Patterns"

This companion site for Peter Morville's new book focuses solely on Search Patterns. There is also a companion Flickr collection of additional patterns. From the site: "Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and mixed reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search applications better today."

This site centers around a Pattern Browser. An interesting take on a pattern browser from the Interface Design Team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. This browser provides a rather more technical and interesting set of filters and I like it a lot.

From the site: "Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design is an intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language. It features real-live examples from desktop applications, web sites, web applications, mobile devices, and everything in between. This site contains excerpts from some of the book's patterns. The book has more, of course -- more introductory material, more patterns, and more examples. Naturally, I'd like you to buy it! But this material has been on the Web for a while, and I'd like to keep it here."

From the site: "Pattern Tap is here to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps. We aspire to be the one stop pattern shop for your next inspiration need."

another companion site, with more resources and examples, for the seminal book Designing Web Interfaces from Bill Scott and Theresa Neil.

a companion site for the seminal book Designing Web Interfaces from Bill Scott and Theresa Neil.

Site that accompanies the book "The Design of Sites." From the site: "Design patterns solve recurring design problems, so you can use pattern solutions to design your sites without reinventing the wheel."

This is a great resource that I think it newish in late 2010. Concentrated on search and discovery...or as the site itself says "...describes principled ways to solve common user interface design problems related to search, faceted navigation, and discovery..."

a quite interesting and ambitious take on a pattern library. There is a "pro" paid version of this but the free access seems instructive for most needs. There are some extensive, recent changes that I have yet not had the opportunity to explore.

Formerly called the UI Pattern Factory... From the site: "Patternry is a resource for everyone who needs to design or develop user interfaces. It is a collection of Web design patterns which helps people solve common design problems when designing interfaces. Soon it will also be a community where everyone can share, create, and collaborate on design patterns. We are still in beta, so be patient with us."

From the site: "User Interface Design patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. Design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This site will help you in two ways: You can read insightful design pattern articles and browse screenshot examples."