Patterns Day is a one-day event focused on design systems. It's for designers, developers, project managers, writers, and anyone else who's working with design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, and components. It's a concentrated, single-day conference that kicked off a lot of people's passion for design systems when it started, and has remained as one of the longest-running design systems conference alongside Clarity in the US.

Clearleft have been running Patterns Day in Brighton since 2017, alongside other great events including UX London, Leading Design, dConstruct and Ampersand, and their latest Patterns Day event was in January 2024. They brought together design system experts from around the world including Jina Anne, Geri Reid, Samantha Fanning and Vitaly Friedman, for a day jam-packed with learning.

Patterns Day has become the design systems community's favorite gathering spot, tackling what can be pretty lonely work by bringing practitioners together to share war stories and realize they're not going through it alone. Started by Clearleft in 2017 as Europe's first design systems conference, it's evolved from helping companies just starting out to supporting teams wrestling with the tricky stuff, like getting people to actually use the systems they've built. What makes it special isn't just the technical talks, but the genuine sense of community it creates. Attendees regularly describe leaving Brighton's cozy Duke of York's cinema feeling recharged and connected, having learned from both the wins and spectacular failures of their peers across the industry.