Tyler Sticka on the complexity of designing buttons and making sure that we’ve taken into consideration focus, hover and active states during the design process:

In truth, mouse effects are probably the least important state to design for. By accounting for more functional states early, you can lower the need for costly redesigns as your pattern library matures. Here are the fundamental states you should address early on, in approximate order of importance.

I’ve been spending a lot more time lately thinking about focus styles as being a crucial challenge when building for the web and so I particularly take Tyler’s advice to heart. He argues that we should repeat this maxim throughout the button design process:

“I do solemnly swear never to disable browser focus styles without including a thoughtfully designed replacement.”

The first step: focusing on focus styles.

On a related note, we recently did a series on CSS Basics that included a post dedicated to link styling for various link states. Also, there’s a pretty good post that’s related to this topic called Buttons in Design Systems that tackles a bunch of UX considerations for buttons, like how to write a good label.

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