OTHER PATTERN COLLECTIONS

The text that started it all dealt with physical buildings, not software. Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, and its companion book, The Timeless Way of Building (both Oxford University Press), established the concept of patterns and described a 250-pattern multilayered pattern language. It is often considered the gold standard for a pattern language because of its completeness, its rich interconnectedness, and its grounding in the human response to our built world.

In the mid-1990s, the publication of Design Patterns, (Addison-Wesley) by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides profoundly changed the practice of commercial software architecture. This book is a collection of patterns describing object-oriented "micro-architectures." If you have a background in software engineering, this is the book that probably introduced you to the idea of patterns. Many other authors have written books about software patterns since Design Patterns. Software patterns such as these do make software more habitablefor those who write the software, not those who use it!

The first substantial set of user-interface patterns was the predecessor of this patterns collection, "Common Ground."^[1] Many other collections and languages followed, notably Martijn van Welie's "Interaction Design Patterns,"^[2] and Jan Borchers's book A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design (Wiley More recently, a full-fledged web site pattern language was published, called The Design of Sites (Addison-Wesley). I highly recommend it, especially if you're designing traditional web sites. If you're building web or desktop applications, or if you're pushing the boundaries in either domain, look at all of these publications; you might find inspiration in any of them.

^[1] http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/common-ground.html

^[2] http://www.welie.com/patterns