Books

Invision | Design Systems Handbook - Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, and Roy Stanfield 🔥

"Best practices around planning, designing, building, and implementing a design system, with insights and first-hand experiences from experts who have gone through the journey."

Design Systems - Alla Kholmatova 🔥

"Based on Alla’s experiences, case-studies from AirBnB, Atlassian, Eurostar, TED, and Sipgate, plus 18 months of research and interviews — all attempting to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in real-life products."

Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

"Insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global."

"Know how to build a design system step-by-step. Based on real projects."

Frontend architecture for design systems - Micah Godbolt

"Takes experienced web developers through the new discipline of frontend architecture, including the latest tools, standards, and best practices that have elevated frontend web development to an entirely new level."

Laying the Foundations - Andrew Couldwell

"What design systems are, why they are important, and how to get stakeholder buy-in to create one."

The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

"A new theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being."



Talks

The technical side of design systems - Brad Frost 🔥

"What's involved in establishing a technical architecture for your design system, including front-end workshop environments, CSS architecture, implementing design tokens, popular libraries like React and Vue.js, deploying design systems, managing updates, and more."

Why Design Systems Fail - Una Kravets

"What makes design systems successful, analyze real examples of success and failure, and show how to make sure your design system has the building blocks it needs to grow into a successful product."

The Future of Design Systems - Hayley Hughes

"How design systems can help businesses become more efficient, resourceful environments as well as help designers create a better user experience."

Building (and re-building) AirBnBs Design System - Maja Wichrowska, Tae Kim

"Airbnb’s experience creating an effective, widely-adopted design system and the decisions and trade-offs that were made to get there."



Podcasts

"Bridging the gap between designers and developers."

"The evolution of design tools, and what it means to design for users who are themselves designers and developers."

"The evolution of Indeed’s design system, and how collaboration across the company is key to any design system’s success."

"Navigating the path from style guide contributor to full-time design systems manager."

"Design Tokens. What are they, what problem do they solve, and how can they be used within an existing Design System?"

"How to implement, maintain, enforce, evangelize, and roll out a design system."

"How they each built experiences with a distinct personality, and as they discuss elevating content, the emotive qualities of white space, and how to use the Material Design system as a springboard for unique expression."

"Unique challenges of designing for developers, the best approach to building design tools, and Google's mobile development platform Firebase."

"Keenan shared with us why he believes that investing in design systems and investing in your team, not only pays-off, but it is a must."



Blogs

A Figma publication for design systems creators, designers, developers, and managers.

A frequently updated collection of Design System examples, articles, tools and talks.

Web design best practices, design systems, responsive design, and other tasty topics.



Case Studies

"What we built, what we learned along the way, and where we’re heading next."

WeWork | Plasma design system - Andrew Couldwell

"How we created a design system at WeWork"

How engineers, designers, and writers centralized standards and built "Slack Kit".

Dropbox | Design Tooling at Scale - Adam Noffsinger

"The story of how Dropbox Design migrated to Figma and structured our cross-platform design system."

Booking | Lessons learned building a design system at scale - Arda Karacizmeli

"How we built the Booking Design System (and how you can get a head start building yours)"

"How having a design system helped Skyscanner — and could help other businesses give themselves a makeover."

"The lessons we learned building our design system and how we dramatically increased the velocity of our design process with it by 8x."

How building a design system empowers your team to focus on people — not pixels - Mariah Muscato

How HobSpot created a design system to make their product consistent, highly functional and delightful.



Example Design Systems

Design system frameworks