UXPin Releases Adele: a Giant Repository of Design Systems

Sometimes you run across a website or app that just blows your mind. You sit there for a minute, wondering just how in the heck they pulled that off. How indeed? Well, good news for everybody! There’s this thing you can do where you can right-click on a page and… I kid. Inspecting the source available in the browser can only tell you so much. Sure, you can extrapolate some aspects of the design and development philosophy by looking at what’s right in front of you, but that will only get you so far. Recognizing this, the people at UXPin have released Adele (not that one), a repository of links to publicly available design systems and pattern libraries. You can browse through, pick a company you want to learn from, and find out exactly how they did what they did, and why they did it that way. The repository doesn’t just tell you where to find the information, though. They tell you what’s available in terms of code, whether the components are available, and which libraries they’re using. It’s all organized in an at-a-glance sort of way, with filters and sorting options to get you started fast. So yeah, if that interests you, go have a look now. Fun fact about the name: the repository is named after Adele Goldberg. She worked at XEROX PARC forty-odd years ago, and helped to create Smalltalk-80, an object-oriented programming language that — while it was not the first — remains influential to this day. Additionally, their work was the foundation for this whole ​“graphical user interface” concept that never really went anywhere. Yes, I’m kidding again. We kind of owe our careers to Adele and her colleagues. I think a code repository is probably the least we can do. She is, in the words of the repository’s creators, an icon.