BEM obsession. Consequence of parametric design
Thousands of hours have been invested by me idle. If you believe the rule of 10,000 hours, then a little more and I could become a tolerable violinist, artisan, athlete, or someone else. But in design and design it does not work. All slag is removed and the clock is reset. And the number of errors and the rate of change are so great that thoughts about the experience gained can be discarded.
The threshold of entry into the formation of an ecosystem for your project or family of projects should not be so crazy and should not be treated as a global heritage. We need a system that uses collective experience, which allows us to improve ourselves on a massive scale, while modifying pointwise for yourself.
As a designer, I don’t want to spend 90% of my time on creating an environment (structure, collectors, and other such things). And I cannot afford to write HTML and CSS in the old fashioned way. Thus, there is a need for an environment for "smart" design .
')
For a while I was proud of the work done. That, as the processes in our team have changed, as we were getting out of complete design chaos . I described this in the article “Designing Scalable Projects” . But I was worried about a few points. And the feeling that we wrote our custom (albeit adequately coping with our tasks) increasingly strained.
Everything began to change when Vitaly Kharisov appeared on one of the @cssunderhood . With his tweets, he pressed harder on those itchy problems in the current process. And by the end of the week I was completely discouraged and saw no reason not to try BEM more thoroughly.
I have come to the BEM methodology in a progressive way through the MCSS . And the question of its use, no longer stood. But "Design in the browser" - so terribly frightening thing for many designers, and its implementation according to the BEM methodology in manual ways simply discourages.
The problem is that you are trying to write the resulting code. But everything changes dramatically when you put the project-stub and try to describe your interface on BEMJSON . I would say that this is a kind of point of no return - when thinking, perception of the interface, its structures and the method of its implementation, changes irreversibly. Here for an example a map kommitov on github-e. Here you can see the moment when I met the project-stub
BEM components were one of the main reasons to start using BEM. They were ideal for prototyping. Although the design of the components, to put it mildly, is not predictable. I think about this can be guessed from reports from the genre - "How to impose a button." But it was these structures that overlapped all the controversial points that had previously been put up with or solved with crutches.
For me, the regularity of the parameters was important. Knowing the tendency to order BEM commands, I expected to find a pattern in the Yandex interfaces. Having looked at most Yandex services, I found a large amount of heterogeneity, despite the outward resemblance of all projects. And I decided to sharpen the design environment for themselves.
Although I learned only the initial part of this great methodology, BEM became for me the most valuable design investment. Knowing my “sympathy” for “Design in the Browser” , I can say that BEM makes it the logical, most powerful and most natural way to implement a high-quality UI.
PS If you have not taken the first steps in BEM as a designer, then you have a great opportunity. Do not hesitate to knock on the BEM community , which is quite active and in the moments of stupor will direct you in the right direction.
Stay BEMed!
The threshold of entry into the formation of an ecosystem for your project or family of projects should not be so crazy and should not be treated as a global heritage. We need a system that uses collective experience, which allows us to improve ourselves on a massive scale, while modifying pointwise for yourself.
As a designer, I don’t want to spend 90% of my time on creating an environment (structure, collectors, and other such things). And I cannot afford to write HTML and CSS in the old fashioned way. Thus, there is a need for an environment for "smart" design .
')
Anti-custom
For a while I was proud of the work done. That, as the processes in our team have changed, as we were getting out of complete design chaos . I described this in the article “Designing Scalable Projects” . But I was worried about a few points. And the feeling that we wrote our custom (albeit adequately coping with our tasks) increasingly strained.
Everything began to change when Vitaly Kharisov appeared on one of the @cssunderhood . With his tweets, he pressed harder on those itchy problems in the current process. And by the end of the week I was completely discouraged and saw no reason not to try BEM more thoroughly.
BEM as a methodology or something more
I have come to the BEM methodology in a progressive way through the MCSS . And the question of its use, no longer stood. But "Design in the browser" - so terribly frightening thing for many designers, and its implementation according to the BEM methodology in manual ways simply discourages.
BEM is more than just a methodology
The problem is that you are trying to write the resulting code. But everything changes dramatically when you put the project-stub and try to describe your interface on BEMJSON . I would say that this is a kind of point of no return - when thinking, perception of the interface, its structures and the method of its implementation, changes irreversibly. Here for an example a map kommitov on github-e. Here you can see the moment when I met the project-stub
Bem-components
BEM components were one of the main reasons to start using BEM. They were ideal for prototyping. Although the design of the components, to put it mildly, is not predictable. I think about this can be guessed from reports from the genre - "How to impose a button." But it was these structures that overlapped all the controversial points that had previously been put up with or solved with crutches.
For me, the regularity of the parameters was important. Knowing the tendency to order BEM commands, I expected to find a pattern in the Yandex interfaces. Having looked at most Yandex services, I found a large amount of heterogeneity, despite the outward resemblance of all projects. And I decided to sharpen the design environment for themselves.
Gutted bem-components
- My start began with prototyping on BEMJSON , using bem-components . For prototypes it was necessary to make small guides. Since I have gone through several Yandex services, I already had a common understanding of how their UI works, although there was not so much in common between services, with the exception of web components. I split each service into several components: typography, colors, indents, control sizes, designs, etc. Having found the patterns, based on the accumulated experience in the formation of living steel guides, I have compiled such a guide for prototypes + I have used bem -grid for constructions of page frames.
- The second global challenge for me was to introduce custom. To form a project UI on the basis of the prototype. And I started with flowers. Optimized bem-components , for convenient customization of their colors.
- I pulled out all the colors that were in the files common.blocks / component / _theme / component_theme_island.styl. It turned out 31 colors (along with shades, transparencies, etc.).
- He brought everything to hsla, so that the primary colors were clearly visible.
- Smashed colors (shades) into groups, by main colors.
- Pulled out into alternating primary colors:
- $ base = # 000
- $ active = # 070
- $ link = # 44b
- $ project = # fc0
- $ alert = # e00
- $ normal = # f6f5f3
- Set hue, saturation, lightness, opacity through Stylus .
- Created a design / colors.styl file and imported it into component styles.
- Optimization process - codepen.io/koloskof/full/gaNGgB
What happened - github.com/bemdesign/bemdesign-components/tree/cosmetic .
It was a good start, but I wanted a more flexible setup. - I pulled out all the colors that were in the files common.blocks / component / _theme / component_theme_island.styl. It turned out 31 colors (along with shades, transparencies, etc.).
- I analyzed all the parameters that need to be changed when shaping my “theme” in accordance with the style of the project. Thus, they turned out 200 pieces . All of them were moved to a separate file. Many of them were not obvious, since they reflected the peculiarity of the designs of BEM components. Therefore, next to each variable it is indicated that it changes (now the process of optimization continues)
- When you have the most dependencies to do Parametric Design , it’s hard to stop. And I wanted to focus on typography. According to Jeffrey Zeldman , 90% of the interface components are typography. And it deserved special attention, so I brought it into a separate component , with several groups of modifiers. That allows flexible, but fairly disciplined to use it in the components. (A couple of size values ​​overlap with components, this is worth paying attention to when customizing)
- Startonul basic Kit , importing variable indents and colors into blocks. This is a damp sketch of an open prototype of the Kit, with which I will be experimenting a lot, polishing BEM for my design needs.
The Most Valuable Design Investment
Although I learned only the initial part of this great methodology, BEM became for me the most valuable design investment. Knowing my “sympathy” for “Design in the Browser” , I can say that BEM makes it the logical, most powerful and most natural way to implement a high-quality UI.
PS If you have not taken the first steps in BEM as a designer, then you have a great opportunity. Do not hesitate to knock on the BEM community , which is quite active and in the moments of stupor will direct you in the right direction.
Stay BEMed!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/274721/
All Articles