: How is a 'design language' different from a style guide or pattern library? Google calls material design their 'design language'. IBM and Airbnb also call what seems like a style guide a design

@Ann6370331

A style guide is a specification. It tells you what fonts and colors you can use under what conditions.

A "design language" should be a Very-High-Level language oriented to design tasks, whether visual design or something else. But usually it's just a buzzword, from whatever I've seen. Nominally, HTML and CSS are "design languages", since they have no other utility at all.

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@Cooney243

A design language typically articulates a general design direction or philosophy that can be used to harmonize presentation and user experience across multiple media types, such as print, video, apps and websites. It is often somewhat more aspirational than prescriptive.

A style guide is typically a more specific interpretation of that design language for one particular medium. So the same organisation might have a print style guide and an app style guide, both of which embody the same design language.

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@Radia289

The Wikipedia description of "Design language" is actually pretty good. From that article:


A design language or design vocabulary is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products or architectural settings. Designers wishing to give their suite of products a unique but consistent look and feel define a design language for it, which can describe choices for design aspects such as materials, colour schemes, shapes, patterns, textures, or layouts. They then follow the scheme in the design of each object in the suite.

Usually, design languages are not rigorously defined; the designer basically makes one thing in a similar manner as another. In other cases, they are followed strictly, so that the products gain a strong thematic quality. For example, although there is a great variety of unusual chess set designs, the pieces within a set are usually thematically consistent.


As read above, a design language is simply making sure that designs look similar to each other to give off a singular look and feel for a product or company. Styleguides can be used in part to help enforce the design language. Animation and interaction are part of the styleguide as well in the cases you mention.

The only real difference between design language and styleguide is that a design language is a unified feeling and a styleguide is how to accomplish that feeling.

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