Pattern Lab is no longer actively maintained. All repositories, along with the rest of the
@pattern-labecosystem on GitHub and npm, have been deprecated and archived. The code, releases, and history remain available so the work stays discoverable and forks can continue independently under the MIT license. No new releases, security patches, or issue triage will be performed.
Pattern Lab began in the early 2010s as a way to put atomic design ideas into practice: a tool for assembling small, reusable patterns into pages, and for making the underlying system visible to everyone on a team. Over more than a decade, it grew into something none of its maintainers could have built alone.
To everyone who filed an issue, opened a pull request, wrote a starterkit, built an edition, shipped a plugin, gave a conference talk, ran a workshop, taught it to a coworker, or used it to deliver a design system at their company: thank you. The shape of this project (and the broader pattern library culture around it) was made by all of you, not by any one of its maintainers. We are grateful for the years.
Atomic design and pattern libraries are table stakes now in how teams build software. They weren't when Pattern Lab started. The idea that an interface should be authored as a system of small, composable parts, with designers and engineers sharing a single living artifact instead of a folder of static comps, was novel as recently as ten years ago.
Pattern Lab didn't invent that idea, but it was one of the first places people could see it working: real atoms, molecules, and organisms, rendered in a browser, viewable across viewports, with annotations and source code side-by-side. A generation of design systems, component libraries, style guides, and developer tools were shaped by what this community demonstrated was possible. Much of what came after in design systems tooling (the vocabulary, the conventions, the expectation that a pattern library is a normal artifact of building software) builds on work that happened in and around these repositories, out loud, in public.
If you're reading this from inside a modern design system codebase and the words atom, molecule, and organism are part of your team's everyday language, that lineage runs through here.
The code, releases, and history remain on GitHub and on npm under the @pattern-lab scope. Forks are welcome and unrestricted under the MIT license.
For new projects, the community has largely scattered to the far corners of industry. CSS Custom Properties, design tokens, and framework-native component documentation is now the norm. We rejoice!
- Brad Frost's book, Atomic Design, remains free to read online and continues to be the canonical reference for the methodology that started all of this.
- Brian Muenzenmeyer's book, Approachable Open Source, synthesizes many of the lessons learned across the years of stewarding Pattern Lab and projects like it. Both are a fitting place to take what was learned here forward.
Pattern Lab was created and stewarded by Brad Frost, Dave Olsen, and Brian Muenzenmeyer, with contributions from hundreds of others across the PHP and Node editions whose names live in the commit logs of these repositories.
To all of you: thank you for the years.
