This book is dedicated to my amazing wife Melissa, who supports all of my crazy ideas and somehow puts up with all of my shit. Thank you. I love you.
I’d like to give a massive thank you to Dave Olsen, who took my nascent, poorly programmed Pattern Lab concept and transformed it into a legit and amazing piece of software. Thanks to the tireless work of Dave and Brian Muenzenmeyer, Pattern Lab is helping teams all over the world create atomic design systems. I’m forever grateful for all of your superb work, and consider myself fortunate to call you friends.
To Josh Clark and Dan Mall for helping solidify atomic design as a methodology and for writing the foreword to this book. You trusted me enough to run with this approach and somehow convinced our clients it wasn’t totally insane. Without your input and the crazy-smart brains of early collaborators like Jennifer Brook, Jonathan Stark, Robert Gorrell, Kelly Shaver, and Melissa Frost, this book wouldn’t have existed.
Thanks to Owen Gregory for copyediting the book’s manuscript and taking on the Herculean task of making me sound reasonably coherent. Thanks to Rachel Andrew for wrangling all the technical stuff that goes into making ebooks. And a big thanks to Rachel Arnold Sager for all your work getting the print version of the book laid out and ready for the printer.
To Anna Debenham for all your amazing thinking about front-end style guides, your book on the topic, and your willingness to co-host a podcast all about style guides with me. I’m proud of the work we’ve done on Styleguides.io and I’m so happy we got to work together.
To Jonathan Snook for your fantastic SMACSS methodology, and for taking the time to guide me through the process of self-publishing a book. Thanks for making such a scary endeavor a lot more approachable.
To Stephen Hay, who was the first person I heard articulate the need to break interfaces into smaller pieces. Thanks for being a continued source of wisdom and sarcasm.
To Andy Clarke, who was talking about design systems and atoms before it was the hip thing to do. Thank you for all your writing and thinking, but you’re still not getting my dog.
To Dave “Tiny Bootstraps” Rupert, Susan Robertson, Samantha Warren, Jina Bolton, Nathan Curtis, Paul Robert Lloyd, Harry Roberts, Nicole Sullivan, Brett Jankord, Tyler Sticka, Lincoln Mongillo, Nicholas Gallagher and the many others who have advanced the concepts of design systems, pattern libraries, and style guides. Thanks for helping me and so many others think more modularly.
To Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Marc Thiele, Vitaly Friedman, and all the other conference organizers who gave me the opportunity to stumble onto the stage to ramble on about the concepts contained in this book.
This book would not have been possible if it weren’t for the amazing work done by some amazing people in the web community. I’m so incredibly fortunate to work in such an open, sharing, and collaborative community; every day I look forward to learning new things from you all.
And last, but certainly not least, thanks so much to my family for all your love and amazing support over the years.