Style tile
style tiles, styletile, visual direction boardDefinition
A one-board design deliverable — headline and body type, a palette, a button, a link, a texture, a few adjectives — that establishes what a site will feel like before any page is laid out; more specific than a moodboard, less committed than a comp
Samantha Warren's 2012 deliverable (styletil.es), made for the conversation where a client cannot react to a mood board and will not stop reacting to a mockup. Its decisions are the ones a design system makes first — type, color, the shape of a control — which is why a tile reads today as a token sheet with a client-facing face, and why this site's nine themes are, in effect, nine tiles applied to one set of components.
The feel of a site, decided before its structure. A tile is agreed on in a meeting and everything after is designed inside it — which is the same job a theme file does for a codebase, one decision at a time. The resource entry is Style Tiles.