The digital pattern library (DPL) is a comprehensive new resource designed to offer tools and support to university colleagues designing or developing new web pages and other digital outputs.
Created and curated by the University’s digital communications team, the digital pattern library is an evolving set of design patterns underpinning a new digital approach for St Andrews, built collaboratively and tested with the people who use our products.
Its purpose is to ensure a consistent user experience, look and feel for all new digital products at the University of St Andrews. It follows the best-practice design principles of the digital communications team, is version controlled via GitHub and is platform agnostic.
Explore the patterns
How we can help
The digital communications team actively and enthusiastically works with colleagues across the University to
- Consult on projects that use the DPL.
- Train developers on the use of existing patterns.
- Create new patterns.
If you would like to use the digital pattern library for your own web project the digital communications team can help.
Please contact the digital communications team by email via itservicedesk@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Kick-off meeting
All developers (including external agencies or partners) who wish to use the DPL to build a product must first organise a kick-off meeting with the digital communications team. It is advisable to do this as soon as possible near the start of your project (within the appraise or define stages).
At this meeting, rules, responsibilities and sign-off gateways will be agreed. These include:
- Information architecture (for webpages);
- Workflows (for web applications);
- Adherence to digital standards, including user-centred design, content management, URL policy, house style, and corporate identity;
- Training.
At this meeting, we will ask for a clear written commitment that no new product using the DPL will go live without the explicit, written sign-off by the digital communications team.
Developing new patterns
To ensure design integrity and consistency of experience for our website users we will ask you to agree that:
- New patterns must be created only by developers working directly alongside the digital communications team;
- No patterns or elements (such as colours) in the DPL may be edited without first liaising with the digital communications team;
- CSS or JavaScript must not be used to overrule DPL elements, patterns, fonts, etc.;
- Developers using the DPL must not fork the version controlled repository.
Going live
Before going live to a production environment with a new website or application, the digital communications team will be involved in a final quality assurance process.
Once explicit and written sign-off has been given by the digital communications team the website or web application may be launched, subject to other University deployment guidelines.
