This is also a really useful way of sharing your designs. If you work in a team, or in an organisation that creates multiple products, you can share complete designs, templates of multi-page design patterns or individual components. Not only does this help save lots of time, it also promotes consistency and best practice in your designs.

What’s been missing is an easy way for you to get access to design libraries and to share your own.

So we’ve just launched www.guidesignpatterns.com where you can download libraries, templates, samples and patterns, and make your own contributions to the community. So, even if you work on your own, you’ll be able to benefit from the work of others and to share your work with them.

Our aim for this site is to build up an extensive resource of common design patterns and elements to help you create your prototypes as quickly as possible.

Contributing your own designs is as easy as sending an email. To help structure and search the database of samples there are some simple guidelines to follow in submitting your work. Things like how to set the right tags and what files to attach.

To help you download and make use of the designs on the site, we’ve prepared three posts to take you through the process for libraries, templates and samples.

There’s also a helpful link within GUI Design Studio to go straight to the set of available libraries from the “New Project” dialog:

And there’s another link within the template browser to take you to the templates on the site:

We’ve started the ball rolling by adding an updated Web Widgets Library and some other templates and samples. We’ll be adding lots more in the next few weeks, so you may want to follow the RSS feed, or bookmark the home page.

We look forward to seeing some of your useful patterns on the site too.