Digital trends may come and go in the flash of an eye, but when it comes to atomic design, marketers should sit up and take notice. Atomic design isn’t just a simple way of styling pages -- it’s a new, comprehensive methodology that’s already changing the way that organizations around the world represent themselves online.

So why should marketers care about atomic design?

1. It’s a whole new way of doing things

While it has the word design in the name, atomic design isn’t just about colors, fonts, or how a logo can be displayed: it's a philosophy that guides both the visual and the technical construction of web platforms. Rather than building everything from different visual parts, atomic design uses these building blocks to ensure a consistent structure and interface. It helps organizations focus on creating design systems, rather than individual pages.

Sounds simple, right? The beauty of an atomic system isn’t just that it’s unified: a properly-constructed atomic site will also be compliant across all its pages with best practices in accessibility and responsiveness. An atomic design will ensure that your most important content remains beautiful and readable by everyone, regardless of how they’re viewing your site.

2. It’s easier to control your branding

At its core, atomic design is the philosophy of combining small elements in a structured way to make larger elements. Eventually, those elements combine into templates, then into pages. With atomic design, the littlest details work in concert with larger parts to create a cohesive, beautiful experience. But this doesn’t just mean that you have a stricter style guide: sites built according to atomic principles usually include page builders that allow content editors to quickly spin-up content by reusing existing templates. This means your site is visually cohesive, your branding is preserved across pages, and your content authors can do their jobs better

3. It’s easier to maintain an atomic site

Atomic designs aren’t just pretty to look at: they’re easier to maintain. Atomic design actually reduces the size of a site’s codebase, given that different components are constantly being reused across pages. Atomic code is easier for a team to maintain, and a site built of atomic components will need fewer visual updates over time, even as the site may be extended with whole new sections of content.

How to learn more about atomic design

Are you interested in learning more about atomic design and how it’s going to change the game for marketers everywhere? Keep an eye out for our upcoming whitepaper, The Marketer’s Guide to Atomic Design, which we’ll publish later this month. For a consultation on how your organization can benefit from an atomic design, contact us and one of our atomic experts will get back to you straightaway.