UI Style Guide: 15 Best Examples & Templates to Inspire You
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Over the past years, the world has gone through a massive transition from traditional to digital channels. An integral part of digital channels, techs, and the screen is the interface elements. A user interface (UI) is the point of human-customer interaction and communication on a digital device or product. Aside from the appearance of the digital product, UI also relates to how a user interacts with an application or a website.
Essentially, a user interface provides a way to draw users to a website or digital product, engage them while they are on the site, and trick them into performing target actions. Therefore, a well-design user interface is significant to the success of your digital products. Conversely, a poor UI design affects your revenue, as your web visitors will likely leave your site if it has an unpleasant scenario and boring design.
As part of your branding, the UI design must have a consistent design that would help users make sense of their experience, especially for an e-commerce website that needs customers to make sales; an inconsistent UI design can make them leave even before completing the payment.
It would be best if you had a UI style guide to maintain a consistent visual that will appeal to clients, help you streamline the design process, and keep all your teams aligned with designing new products. This article will explain what a UI style guide is, why you need it, and the 15 best examples to use as inspiration.
Keep reading!
What is a UI style guide?
User interface style guides are design guidelines or standards and a development tool for designing UI elements and interactions for various websites or app products. These document usually contains the essential details relating to your product’s user interface to ensure consistency across different screen sizes, design teams, companies, and brands.
A UI style guide outlines design elements, such as typography, colors, layout, buttons, fonts, other components, etc., approved for use in the brand guideline. These guidelines are essential for design and product teams to keep the UI style guides consistent.
Why might you need UI style guides?
For many reasons, developing a UI style guide is crucial when designing your digital product. If you are creating your digital product for the first time without any prior design, a style guide will help you streamline your design process and help you stay organized and in line with your brand design guidelines.
Since your UI design is part of your brand design, it is good for you to have a consistent design, so it impacts your brand visibility. A UI style guide helps you to save time when making design decisions and prevent back and forth. Importantly, these guidelines also ensure that all your designers (new or old) understand what to include and avoid when designing your product UI.
A style guide drives your business success by creating positive user experiences (for example, if you have an e-commerce site, consistent branding on your site interface will make it easy for your customers and potential customers to navigate the site easily, find what they want, and complete payment).
Finally, a style guide is helpful when growing a design team from scratch. In addition, they come in handy when onboarding new designers to the groups, providing them with all the essential information they need to quickly adopt the look and feel of the product features, colors, and brand guidelines to the Ui design.
Difference between UI Style Guides and Design systems
UI style guides are set rules with a complete list of user interface design’s do’s and don’ts. Unfortunately, it is often easily confused with the term “design system,” different design guidelines designers use. If you don’t know what design system means, here’s a definition.
A design system is a complete list of design principles, standards, and documentation that guides designers and developers to design consistent products and increase sales. It is an all-encompassing design document that contains design style guides, design patterns, technical specifications, and component libraries to improve product and brand consistency.
A style guide is an element of a design system that lists out rules regarding the brand and visual style of products. The critical difference between a UI style guide and a design system is that the former focuses on the product’s overall aesthetics. At the same time, the latter specifies how different design components within the design aesthetics look and function.
Benefits of UI Style Guides for Users and Design Teams
As mentioned in the earlier part of this blog article, a UI style guide benefits the UI users and not just the design team. Hence in this section, we will share the benefits of UI style guides for designers and users.
Benefits of UI style guides for Users
Adopting a UI-style design for your digital products can help your web users feel more confident and comfortable interacting with your products. Better user engagement increases brand loyalty, which could increase your success rate for the product. Here are some of the benefits of UI style guides:
- First, it makes it easier for users to understand the digital product.
- Second, it builds coherent experiences that help users feel comfortable using your product.
- Third, adding intuitive features can help users interact with your digital products without reading instructions.
- Consistent branding increases brand recognition and helps users recognize another website or application developed by your company.
- It enhances brand loyalty.
Benefits of UI style guides for Design Teams
UI style guides guide designers to streamline the development process and create consistent and well-designed digital products that increase your brand’s success. Here are some of the benefits of UI style guides:
- Creating your own UI style guide provides clear instructions or guidelines for designers to follow when designing the product’s UI features.
- It helps to save the time designers will spend seeking guidance from product supervisors or leaders.
- It offers developers and designers easy access to a library of approved assets and elements that should be included in the products.
- It encourages and improves collaboration between designers and developers since they are all on the space page regarding design requirements.
- It reduces the stress and burnout that comes with creating suitable designs.
What should be included in a UI Style Guide?
Now that we have covered what a UI style guide means and its benefits, the next step is understanding everything you should include in your style guide. Below are the elements of UI style guides that you should include when creating your UI style guides:
1. Typography
The typography section of your UI style guide contains guidelines on the fonts to include in your designs. It should have the following:
- The specific font to use in all your product UI designs.
- A list of font sizes and weights to show visual hierarchy.
- Additional guidelines on the fonts as well as colors and links fonts to include in the design.
It also states the font’s compatibility on different browsers and screen sizes to ensure that it appears the same to all users.
2. Colors
Colors are an essential part of the visual brand, and UI design that sets the mood for brand expression improves brand recognition and enhances solid emotional connections with customers. However, your choice of colors can make or mar your user engagement success.
Since cohesive color schemes are significant for ensuring consistency, communicating with users, and making the user interface attractive and engaging, your UI style guide must outline the accepted color palette and scheme used in the guide.
3. Iconography
Icons represent objects, symbols, or concepts with specific meanings universally recognized in a creative design. Icons are essential elements of UI that can be used to provide a simple and easy way to improve the accessibility of a product user interface. Usually, for UI designs, icons are paired with typography to explain or guide users on what the different icons used on the site mean and where they will lead them.
In other situations, icons can organize similar functions like navigation, controls, tools, data, and many more.
4. Layouts and grids
Layouts and grids are essential UI design elements that indicate where and how different visual aspects of digital products are placed. So, the UI style guide must contain complete information and standards for acceptable layouts and grids to ensure consistency of the design project and help users move from page/screen to page/screen.
Also, considering the different guidelines available on different screens, devices, and search engines, including clear instructions on the different layouts and grids, can help your digital product appear the same across different screen sizes.
5. Components
The last on our list is the components you choose for UI designs and how they will all be displayed to enhance user experience and avoid confusion across your products. An excellent way to have consistent components in your UI design is to create design systems alongside your Ui style guides to understand better how every design component would look.
Although we have already listed some of the components above, it is equally important to include all the elements that would make UI design simple, accessible, and functional.
15 Best UI Style Guide Examples to Inspire you
UI Style guides or UI guidelines are necessary visual standards or rules that guide designers and developers on the approved design elements to include in a digital product to ensure consistency. We have classified all the best UI style guides examples to include in this blog article:
5 Best UI Style Guides for Figma
Here are the set guidelines for Figma:
1. Pockie eCommerce Design System
Pockie eCommerce website design on Figma offers a convenient way to build strategies and marketing campaigns. It includes multiple color schemes, font options, templates, a library of over 500 components, and various screens for numerous functions.
2. Smart Home System
The intelligent home system serves as a basis for the design process and is referenced for building a smart home app or something similar to this app. It includes free fonts, layered design, documentation, full customization, etc.
3. Mobile look design
The mobile look design style guide is a complete mobile starter kit for creating iOD and Android user interfaces. It includes a variety of charts, a style guide with a full list of all UI elements, over 200 responsive symbols, well-designed and organized layers, and an 8-point grid.
4. Dihome Figma design
The Dihome Figma Design Style Guide is an excellent choice for real estate industries, with features for real estate application processing, tour requests, accepting rent payments, meeting requests, and so much more. It includes over 50 icons, over 250 components, over 150 styles, six feature templates, 40 mobile screens, and many more.
5. Figma Design Styl
The Figma UI Design style is an idea for different user interface designs on Figma. It contains UI components and elements that can be repeatedly reused and reconfigured to suit your needs. It includes a color guide, free fonts, over 60 different buttons, numerous screens or templates, and organized layers that you can use to create your own style guides.
5 Best UI Style Guides for Sketch
6. Dashboard UI style guide Template
The Dashboard UI style guideis an excellent starter kit for creating complex dashboards that can help designers create complex dashboard UI designs. It includes color styles, typography, UI components, elements, and symbols.
7. Sketch Style guide
A sketch-style guide is a starker kit that works with Sketch, and Figma helps you work faster and more innovative and saves you time. It includes 14 flexible charts, an extensive style guide, components, and over 200 responsive symbols.
8. Dark Dashboard UI Style guide
Dark Dashboard UI Style guide is a reference for designers to include UI elements and typography to make the website easy to read and digest quickly.
9. Enso Brand style guide
Enso brand style guide is a unified style guide created for better collaboration between designers and developers. It mainly includes UI elements, buttons, color pickers, labels, checkboxes, date pickers, inputs, and many more.
10. Bond Sales Management Dashboard style
The bond Sales Management dashboard template has been designed for all admin and sales management types. It includes various typography, color styles, premade UI components, UI elements, and symbols.
5 Best UI Style Guides for Adobe Illustrator
11. UI Style Kits
This UI style kit is a starter template for a dark-themed style guide for anyone looking to break wat from the conventional bright designs. It is a good reference for creating dark designs and includes a list of icons and fonts.
12. Ramni UI Shopping Kit
Ramni UI shopping style guide is a high-quality kit for eCommerce, Online shopping, and marketplace store apps. It is beautiful and has vibrant colors that can be easily edited and customized for your specific design needs.
13. ZenMotors Design System
The ZenMotors Design Style Guide is a simple, straightforward, and complete style kit designed by Pasindu Madushan, a Sri Lankan designer. It includes various desktop and mobile device elements, such as buttons, color palettes, labels, fonts, input forms, and many more. Its color styles have solid colors and gradients.
14. Brand Style Guide Illustrator
This complete style guide is available in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, and InDesign. Although it has only a free trial version with six pages and two sections, you will have to pay to use the complete set.
15. Brand Style Guide Template
This brand style guide template is a recreated American Red Cross in a highly customizable AI file that can be edited to create your brand design. It is a printable poster with several vital elements and brand variables such as typography, logo colors, placements, sizes, and more. This style guide is available for Adobe Illustrator and comes in AI, PDF, and EPS formats in A3 size.
Tips For Creating UI Style Guides
Here are the tips for creating a UI style guide:
- It should be easy to use by people from different disciplines, professional experiences, and cultural backgrounds.
- It should have clean, uncluttered screen layouts that are well-organized, legible, and clearly labeled. To make it easy to use, keep the visual information minimal and use spacious arrangements.
- Keep the design instructions short and straight to the point. For example, use bullet points in place of lengthy paragraphs. Also, prioritize visuals over words.
- Since digital products are updated frequently, you must keep all relevant version histories to help product teams.
Best UI Style Guide Generators
The following are the best tools/software that you can use to generate UI style guides.
1. Mockplus
Mockplus is an online design platform that allows users and designers to gather and manage UI style guides, components, and design systems. It integrates your design workflow and offers a complete set of features that allows users to design, prototype, collaborate, comment, and discuss.
2. Fabricator
Fabricator is an online tool for building UI style guides and design systems from their UI toolkit code. It also allows you to organize your design system, such as the components, structures, elements, and more, the way you want.
3. Aigis
Aigis is a Node.js package, a casual-to-use style guide generator that lets you auto-generate a UI style guide from any text file. It is compatible with many text file formats such as .css, .scss, .md, .styl, etc.
Conclusion
A UI style guide is an official instruction document describing an app’s visual elements and design, such as icons, color palettes, fonts, buttons, and other UI elements. A good style guide can help developers and designers communicate and collaborate more effectively and ensure the design is consistent.
We have provided 15 examples of UI style guides, tips, and UI style guide generators that you can learn from to create your style guides.
