It’s hard to believe it’s been almost three years since the publication of Ethan Marcotte’s seminal Responsive Web Design article on A List Apart. The ideas and techniques described therein blew our minds while forcing us to drastically reconsider our design processes. Even today, the struggle continues to determine which design deliverables make sense in a post-PSD era.

Personally, I dig Dave Rupert’s idea of “Tiny Bootstraps, for Every Client”:

Responsive deliverables should look a lot like fully-functioning Twitter Bootstrap-style systems custom tailored for your clients’ needs. These living code samples are self-documenting style guides that extend to accommodate a client’s needs as well as the needs of the ever-evolving multi-device web.

The whole post is great, and it got me thinking… along with solid content strategy, design and engineering processes, what steps can we take to insure our “tiny bootstraps” are comprehensive enough to remain relevant and useful long after launch?

Cue Jason with a cool idea: We could document patterns in existing frameworks. A list of what’s typically included might serve as a good starting point, something to measure our client deliverables against to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything obvious.

In which I willingly make a spreadsheet

I combed through a (non-exhaustive) collection of suitably broad or noteworthy links from Anna Debenham‘s list of front end styleguides and pattern libraries, recording instances of observed patterns and adding new ones as necessary. I skipped over anything that seemed too idiosyncratic, and grouped elements of similar intent even if their description or implementation differed.

The results are contained in this handy Google Doc.

Lessons learned

I found this to be a worthwhile exercise. It helped me wrap my head around the elastic scope of a “tiny bootstrap.”

I thought there’d be more overlap between frameworks than there is. I recorded over 160 distinct patterns, none of them ubiquitous. Some came pretty close, especially headings 2 through 4, typographic elements and pre-HTML5 form elements. No single framework included even half of the total recorded patterns (Bootstrap had the most).

Sometimes the most infrequent elements surprised me with how obvious they seemed in retrospect. For example, color guides and font stacks only occur in a couple of places.

The thought of maintaining the document indefinitely makes me queasy, but I’ve already started referring to it frequently. I’d love to know if anyone finds it as interesting or useful as I have.