PatternFly: An open source design system

https://www.patternfly.org/

by alexzeitler • 3 years ago

70 31 3 years ago

illiarian6• 3 years ago

What is it with modern "designers" and their visceral hate towards text input boxes: https://www.patternfly.org/v4/components/text-input

For all their talk about accessibility they go out of their way to make basic input as inaccessible as possible.

Remember how Google needed a user study with 600 people to arrive at common sense conclusion that text input has to look like text input? (And sti failed to make it be that) Yeah

jmholla• 3 years ago

What's wrong with the text boxes?

setr• 3 years ago

My own issue with these is that they handle excessive input by horizontal scrolling, which can only be considered a solution by someone who prioritizes the consistency/alignment of their layout over usability (a truly villainous prioritization)

Scarbutt• 3 years ago

They only have a bottom border that stands out.

illiarian6• 3 years ago

Modern "designers" hate that input boxes are just that: visually recognizable accessible input boxes. They go out of their way to make it anything but an easily recognizable input box.

"Oh, why don't we make it just a white field on a white background with just an underlines and perhaps invisible light gray borders. And for disabled state we'll make it an unreadable gray on gray"

You see it everywhere. That 600 people study that Google did for Material Design? It's infuriating, through and through: "Enclosed text fields with a rectangular (box) shape performed better than those with a line affordance" https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...

Compare and contrast with people who actually think about these things: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/text-input/

4dayworkweek4u• 3 years ago

Good point!

thangngoc89• 3 years ago

You reminded me of all those Google Form inputs that only have a single line but expecting me to fill in more than a short sentence. It’s even more frustrating on mobile (Safari, iOS) that I can’t move the cursor anywhere

rickette• 3 years ago

Since it isn't clearly mentioned on the site: PatternFly is founded by RedHat (now part of IBM) and serves as a foundation for https://ux.redhat.com/.

Formerly PatternFly was rather RedHat specific but it looks like they've spin-off the RedHat parts and made PatternFly general purpose (which is great ofcourse).

awesomegoat_com• 3 years ago

Yes.

IIRC, Patternfly started many years ago, because many open source project (of Red Hat interest), had inconsistent ui. The idea was to develop a common guideline that other open source projects could use and be somewhat consistent with each other. To have a framework, artwork and guidelines that would be available on permissive terms forever.

justusw• 3 years ago

Sorry if I may seem ignorant, but how is this different from Storybook? Is one a finished design system, and the latter one just a tool do document your design system?

majestic5762• 3 years ago

PatternFly is a UI lib with premade components that you can use to build your app with. Storybook is used to showcase your app's UI and people often use it to showcase their own design systems

sergiomattei• 3 years ago

I love when companies open source their design systems like this. It’s great for learning how to build consistent design language, like picking colors and such.

seymon• 3 years ago

How does patternfly compare to the carbon design system? https://carbondesignsystem.com/

Since red hat now belongs to ibm and patternfly is from red hat ans rhe carbon design system is from ibm i wonder which one will stay!?

re-thc• 3 years ago

Who's the boss? :)

gjvc2• 3 years ago

from https://www.patternfly.org/v4/ux-writing/numerics

"When you represent the date as a numeric value or label, use MM-DD-YYYY."

possibly the dumbest date format known to man. ISO 8601 for time format is eschewed, but they do go on to make a gesture towards internationalisation with:

"Use a currency's ISO three-digit numeric code when writing for computerized systems or for countries that don't use Latin scripts."

(That's ISO 4217 for all the standards buffs.)

xupybd• 3 years ago

For completeness https://xkcd.com/1179/

sshine• 3 years ago

The neatest thing about YYYY-MM-DD is that it disambiguates between American and European dates.

gjvc2• 3 years ago

that's rather the point of my original comment...

rad_gruchalski• 3 years ago

And is sorted correctly as string.

butz• 3 years ago

What are other similar UI component libraries, that have "enterprise" oriented components, like data tables and decent accessibility? Being JS framework agnostic (web components) is a pro too.

awesomeMilou• 3 years ago

Material Design has web components now.

illiarian6• 3 years ago

No one should ever recommend Material Design for anything.

In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d.... (Edit: and their text fields by default still don't look like text fields, you have to specifically set them to `outlined`)

Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258

illiarian6• 3 years ago

Taber is probably the only UI framework that has tables and such: https://preview.tabler.io/ It's not too easy to work with because you need to learn its idosyncrasies and classes etc., but design-wise it's very decent.

PatternFly: An open source design system

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