Modern frameworks have brought on a paradigm shift for developers in which products are built by combining a series of smaller components into complex systems which can adapt to different contexts and devices. This makes the code easier to maintain, and the entire system more flexible.

For a variety of legitimate reasons, many designers have not caught on to this paradigm shift as quickly as developers. We are missing a mental model for creating the pieces that make up these interfaces independently from their environment/pages/screens/viewports etc.

One such approach is Atomic Design.