Design Patterns Wiki
Welcome to the design patterns wiki. This is a community run open source design pattern collection built ontop of the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia.
This means that you can and are encouraged to help us add to and edit the design patterns collection instantly without needing to sign up for an account.
What is a design pattern?
A design pattern is a functional piece of a design that can be re-used elsewhere.
A simple example of a design pattern is a button. Buttons in the physical world differentiate themselves from the surface they are on using height and color in order to call attention to themselves and signal that they should be pressed. Buttons in the digital world often visually mimic physical buttons because the majority of humans have pressed a physical button before. By using things that look similar to physical buttons, digital designers use the button design pattern from the physical world in digital products so that the people using their products don’t have to guess "What is this thing?" when they land on that screen for the first time.
Why do designers use patterns?
Because the invention of new things is incredibly rare. People have been designing for screen based interaction for almost 60 years. All designers re-use and build upon existing pieces of designs that come before. If designs did not build upon one-another, the learning curve for each new product we use would be unmanageably difficult.
What is the design patterns wiki?
Design patterns wiki is a digital reference book for user interface design. There are books and websites that contain some reference material for designers, but because of the pace and fluidity of digital design, it's impossible to capture the state of interface design in a print volume and one person efforts to document good design are likely bound to fail or be very limited in scope. A community is needed to compile this information and to keep it up to date.
Why a wiki?
Because it's free - free to edit, free to use, and on this one because of the CC0 designation, completely free to re-use as you see fit- commercially or non commercially - use a pattern you find here as an example in a class or in your own book about design patterns.
It also means it can be kept up to date by anyone and anyone can add a pattern they've seen.
Contribution guide
You can edit any page on this site (with a few exceptions). You don't need an account to do it. Edits are instant and once you hit save your changes will be live.
Learn more about how to add a pattern on the add a pattern page