What is Atomic Design?
Atomic Design is a methodology proposed by Brad Frost for designing and organizing frontend side of a project in a structured, hierarchical manner.
It divides frontend into five hierarchical layers: atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
A layer is just a group used to organize components.
Technically, these layers are represented as directories in the project structure
Layers of Atomic Design
In Atomic Design, layers represent hierarchical levels of abstraction, each with a single responsibility. They work independently, following a single-threaded flow, meaning each layer focuses on its domain without overlapping responsibilities:
- Atoms: Basic UI elements (e.g., buttons, icons).
- Molecules: Groups of atoms (e.g., a labeled input).
- Organisms: Combinations of molecules (e.g., a navbar).
- Templates: Layouts structuring organisms.
- Pages: Templates with real content.
For example, atoms can be used to build molecules, and molecules can be combined to create organisms, but the flow is strictly one-directional. An organism cannot be used to construct a molecule or an atom, ensuring a clear separation of concerns and preventing circular dependencies.
This approach ensures clarity, modularity, and reusability, making it easier to scale and maintain components while avoiding unnecessary dependencies between layers.
When is Atomic Design Suitable?
Atomic Design is most effective in projects where UI dominates and there is little to no complex business logic or entities. This is because Atomic Design often lacks clear guidelines on where to handle business logic, which can lead to confusion in such cases.
Advantages of Atomic Design
- Reusability: Components are modular and reusable across parts of the application with minimal redundancy.
- Easy Maintenance: With modules, there is ease of modification or removal without affecting the unrelated parts of the application.
- Single-Threaded Data Flow: The clarity of the hierarchy ensures a one-way flow. From lower-level components being used to build higher-level components-never vice versa.
- Consistency: It encourages a consistent design system in which there is a structured way of creating components.
- Scalability: The hierarchical structure simplifies adding new components or features.
Limitations of Atomic Design
While Atomic Design offers considerable advantages in terms of UI structure and reusability, it has some limitations, particularly in projects involving business logic and domain entities. Here are some common issues developers may encounter:
1. Lack of Clear Guidance for Business Logic
Atomic Design focuses primarily on UI components and their organization, leaving gray areas when it comes to handling business logic. Some of the common questions include:
- Where should user data be stored?
- Where should API calls and state management live?
In Atomic Design, the structure doesn't provide clear guidance on this. Developers face two main challenges:
- Adding business logic directly to the components, which violates the separation of concerns principle.
- Placing business logic outside of the component hierarchy, which can feel disconnected from the visual components.
2. No Clear Structure for Domain Entities
Since Atomic Design is mostly concerned with visual components, it lacks a framework for handling domain models or business entities. For example, in an e-commerce application, questions arise such as:
- How should product data, user profiles, or shopping cart information be managed?
- Should business entities be stored in a separate directory outside the Atomic Design hierarchy, or should they be integrated into the component structure?
3. Complex Interactions.
While atoms and molecules are highly reusable, the complexity increases as you move to organisms and templates. As components become more complex, managing inter-component communication becomes more difficult. Atomic Design doesn't provide clear strategies for handling these interactions, leading developers to put in extra effort to implement communication patterns between components.
Should you use Atomic Design in 2025?
The short answer is probably no. For modern frontend projects in 2025, where business logic and domain entities are more prevalent, Atomic Design is rarely used. Instead, other architectural approaches are better (Modular Architecture, Feature-Sliced Design, etc.) suited to meet the evolving requirements of contemporary frontend development.
Also, IMHO, using terms like atoms, molecules, etc., is debatable as they are more relevant for designers building layouts and mockups in tools like Figma than for developers.
Atomic Design is an interesting framework for structuring UI components in a modular and reusable way, ideal for projects with minimal business logic.
However, as frontend applications become more complex with business entities and logic, its limitations become clear, especially in terms of handling and storing business logic.
In 2025, for UI-heavy projects with little business complexity, Atomic Design still works well, but for modern, more complex applications, methodologies like Modular Architecture or Feature-Sliced Design are better suited to handle both UI and business logic effectively.
For examples of frontend projects using Atomic Design with React, you can explore:
Top comments (1)
Very useful! Thank you