Top Books on Design System that i Read last year

This blog would be helpful for UI/UX designers, product manager, product designers, frontend developers, if you have peer or friends in those roles do share the blog with them. Can be a good new year gift as well. Just saying ?!

Creating a Design System - The Why Book

Creating anything of great value requires a great purpose around it. Purpose exists in the problem space. If your purpose is to solve the problems of your stakeholders you must understand their problems better than them. And therefore you need new perspective lense. Reading this book would give you that lense and pattern to discovery user problems, you can then create a framework in your mind to solve the problems.

1. CONTINUOUS DISCOVERY HABITS - by Teresa Torres

Recommended for Product Designers, Product manager, UX Designer much for then Frontend developers or UI Designers.

Few Notes from the book :

• Begin With the End in Mind

• Opportunity Solution Tree

• Frame, refine, and prioritize the opportunity space

• Prioritizing Opportunities, not solutions

• Two way Door Decisions

• Quantity Leads to Quality

• Testing Assumption, Not Ideas

• Measuring Impact

2. Laying the Foundations - by Andrew Couldwell

Design System 101

This book is real talk about creating design systems. No jargon, no glossing over the hard realities, and no company hat. Just good advice, experience, and practical tips.

Notes:

• How to Sell a design system at your company ?

• Mission, values, and principles of a design System

• Much more learning from the book

I would highly recommend the book to UI Designer, Product Designer, the book also focus more on practical tips, and setting up realistic expectations

3. Thinking in Systems: A Primer - By Donella Meadows

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows is an insightful guide to understanding and working with complex systems.

Here's a brief summary of the book's key concepts:

• What is a System?

• Stocks and Flows

• Feedback Loops, Delays, Leverage Points

• System Traps and Opportunities

• Mental Models

Recommended for Product Manager, Team Leads, or developers as well, anyone who like systems in general.

4. Articulating Design Decisions:

Great Designers are great StoryTellers as well

• Easy to Read,

• Book is highly about communication, meeting, getting consensus, understand client needs or how to handle them.

• Some of the advice may be highly general, but give a good context.

Recommended for Designers, Product Designer, Freelancers.

Designing Design System - The What Books

What and who to Design for, Do you understand the domain, Do you know the Design foundations even ?

1. Design Systems - By Alia Kholmatova

Notes:

• I found the book highly visually appealing, very structured, and filled with example

• Book give you everything, pattern, principles, structure as to how to start creating Design System

• The Books is quite short, have a number of reference after every chapter.

Recommended for Designers, Developers, and Product Managers as well. I quite like the book,i am a bit biased.

2. Design School - Type

The Book is a practical and visually engaging guide that delves into the fundamentals of typography and its application in design.

Here's a concise summary of the book's key takeaways:

• Typography Basics

• Type Hierarchy

• okay i like the aesthetics of the book

• Typography in Layouts and Grids

• Typographic Principles

• Just Read the Book it's great

Recommended for Designers, Product Designer.

3. Design School - Layout

Yup I read this first, and then I read the type one. i like the aesthetics of this books

Notes:

• Layout Fundamentals

• Grids, Grid System,

• Layout Composition

• Terminologies

• Book also have a test your knowledge section at the end of each chapter. Nice!

I was really bad with layout understanding, and grids as a developer. This book helped me with that, now i love grids. Good tutorial for css Grid

Building Design System - The How Books

Creating a cohesive and effective design system is no small feat—it requires a deep understanding of design principles, organization, and collaboration.

1. Frontend Architecture for Design Systems

Recommended for Developer, Design Engineers, Team lead, Product Manager

Notes:

• the Book is quite old now, published in pre tailwind era (2016)

• Css Approaches mentioned are good

• a wholesome book, filled with real life example

• Best learning was the way of break down of design into design system at Red hat .com

• As we say basics remain the same, this books will be great refresher on them. code examples are quite outdated.

2. Design System for Developers - By Michael Mangialardi

Recommended for Developer, Design Engineers, It's like a hands on tutorial on creating Design System.

Notes:

• Learn how to code design systems that scale

• Best Hands on guide on Design System for Developers.

• Goes in depth with Naming, creating, developing Design Tokens

• Learn Style-dictionary

• Tailwind example

3. Building Design Systems - by Sarrah Vesselov and Taurie Davis

Recommended for Designers, Developers, Product Managers, Product Designers. Loved the perspective of Sarrah and Taurie.

Notes:

• Creating a Typographic System

• An Accessible Color System

• The Case study of Gitlab is great

• Gives you primers on Open sourcing your Design System

• Loved the Concept of Shared Design Language

4. Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility - Ashley Firth

Recommended for Designers, Developers, QA, PM, Product Designers.

Notes:

• Chapter are based on Disabilities and how to

• Learn Aria

• Keyboard Accessibility

• Intro to Screen Reader Softwares, Browser build-in ones

• After each chapter there are a number of reference, so that you can learn in depth about the same

• styling cue in audio and video tags, didn't know that

An extensive guide on how to style for RTL in CSS

https://rtlstyling.com/posts/rtl-styling

5. Inclusive Design Patterns - By Heydon Pickering

Recommended for Developers, QA, PM, Product Designers.

Notes:

• Filled with code example for accessibility

• Schematic HTML is explained well

• Using readability checker

• Some of the tips are highly practical

• Explains the bad practise and how to solve them

• Every chapter has things to avoid

• Testing for accessibility

Perks of reading the whole article, or scrolling. If you need any of the book pdf files, email me at pratik@coolhead.in . I will share them with you.

buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/biomathcode

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