As humans, we see patterns all over the place — how do we read? We identify patterns of letters. How do we navigate around our world? We see visual patterns and respond to them in our habitual ways. In fact, there’s a common phenomenon called apophenia, where we see patterns in randomness all the time (even when there really isn’t a pattern there).

So why not put this pattern-seeking behavior to good use? When doing design or development, there are also an array of patterns out there. In terms of development, this may be a broad framework pattern, like Model-View-Controller, that specifies how one can build the basic structure of an application — or something smaller, like how a variable can be structured.

But patterns exist in design as well — and I don’t mean the textured backgrounds or patterns that dress up a layout. Rather, as in development, these can be broad structures (like a layout pattern, for instance, a grid-based layout), a navigation feature (like double-tab navigation), or a functional aspect, like a captcha.

So why are these patterns important? Well, the more comfortable you are with the patterns, the easier (and faster) it is to bake them into projects. Even better, as you get more comfortable, you begin to extend the patterns and do new variations that help evolve design (and/or development) in new and interesting ways.

And therein lies the potential problem with pattern-based design or development — it can make it too easy to stay within the same set of parameters, and things stagnate. Nobody wants to see that you build the same old thing for every different client or need. If you hew too closely to the patterns or use them by rote, you are losing a lot of creativity.

But knowing the patterns and how they work is one of the best starting points there is — after all, if you’re going to leap off into the great design/development unknown, why not start atop a foundation of years of others’ expertise. You’ll get a lot further that way.