
I.e., once you’ve gotten sign-off on Playfair Display as a headline font, you’re good to use it in the final design.

At the same time, they make it easy to work those trees into the forest. Style tiles are obviously just sample design elements, so they keep reviewers focused on the trees, not the forest.


When you look at the tiles for The Washington Examiner, it’s obvious how the typography and colors manifest ideas like “authoritative,” “insightful,” and “conservative.” Practicality Style tiles help clients and stakeholders literally see the intimate relationship between abstractions like brand attributes and concrete design elements. Advantages of designing style tiles Clarity Samantha’s is great for a newspaper site, but if you’re working on, say, a restaurant site, you might want to include image treatments for food photography, type styles for the menu, etc. Pro tip: Tailor your style tiles to the site you’re making. The elements of Samantha’s template prove particularly useful for a text-heavy website like a newspaper: once it’s approved, you’ll have most everything you need. You can tell at a glance that style tiles keep the conversation at a high level, while remaining actionable. Samantha’s style tile template offers room for: Samantha Warren's style tiles let you detail visual design elements without mocking up full pages. Sourceĭesigner Samantha Warren writes that style tiles “help form a common visual language between the designers and the stakeholders and provide a catalyst for discussions around the preferences and goals of the client.” They do that by creating a middle ground between moodboards, which many clients find too vague, and full mockups, giving designers space to iterate on ideas before going all-in on a specific approach.
