Whether you’re a beginner or looking to maintain your existing system, there’s always room for learning and growth.
by Donella H. Meadows, 2008, 217 pages
This is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global.
Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.
Format: kindle, audiobook, paperback.
by Brad Frost, 2016, 193 pages
Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. This book introduces a methodology for thinking of our UIs as thoughtful hierarchies, discusses the qualities of effective pattern libraries, and showcases techniques to transform your team’s design and development workflow.
Format: ebook (ePub, kindle, pdf, mobi, iBooks, Nook, and other e-readers).
by Alla Kholmatova, 2017, 288 pages
What are the key qualities of a well-functioning, enduring design system? Throughout the book, Alla will share an approach that will help you every day with your work.
Split into two parts, foundations and processes. There is a focus on patterns and design systems for developing a digital product and design language.
Format: ebook (ePub, kindle, pdf), paperback.
by Invision, 222 pages
This book guides readers through 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.
by Yesenia Perez-Cruz from A Book Apart, 2019, 126 pages
Good design systems can help you create digital products with efficiency and consistency. But great design systems will support and strengthen your team’s creativity at the same time.
In Expressive Design Systems, Yesenia Perez-Cruz shows you how to build useful, dependable systems that not only maintain harmony across your products, but also flex to accommodate inspiration and experimentation. Learn to communicate your brand, collaborate across teams — and do so much more than standardize components.
Format: ebook, paperback.
by Andrew Couldwell, 2019, 268 pages
Laying the Foundations is a comprehensive guide to creating, documenting, and maintaining design systems, and how to design websites and products systematically. It’s an ideal book for web designers and product designers (of all levels) and especially design teams.
This is real talk about creating design systems and digital brand guidelines. No jargon, no glossing over the hard realities, and no company hat. Just good advice, experience, and practical tips.
System design is not a scary thing — this book aims to dispel that myth. It covers what design systems are, why they are important, and how to get stakeholder buy-in to create one. It introduces you to a simple model, and two very different approaches to creating a design system. What’s unique about this book is its focus on the importance of brand in design systems, web design, product design, and when creating documentation. It’s a comprehensive guide that’s simple to follow and easy on the eye.
Format: kindle, paperback (color, black and white).
By Sarrah Vesselov & Taurie Davis, 2019, 166 pages
Learn how to build a design system framed within the context of your specific business needs. This book guides you through the process of defining a design language that can be understood across teams, while also establishing communication strategies for how to sell your system to key stakeholders and other contributors.
With a defined set of components and guidelines, designers can focus their efforts on solving user needs rather than recreating elements and reinventing solutions. You’ll learn how to use an interface inventory to surface inconsistencies and inefficient solutions, as well as how to establish a component library by documenting existing patterns and creating new ones. You’ll also see how the creation of self-documenting styles and components will streamline your UX process.
Building Design Systems provides critical insights into how to set up a design system within your organization, measure the effectiveness of that system, and maintain it over time. You will develop the skills needed to approach your design process systematically, ensuring that your design system achieves the purpose of your organization, your product, and your team.
Format: kindle, paperback.
by Diana MacDonald, 2019, 318 pages
Understanding UI patterns is invaluable to anyone creating websites for the first time. It helps you make connections between which tools are right for which jobs, understand the processes, and think deeply about the context of a problem. This is your concise guide to the tested and proven general mechanisms for solving recurring user interface problems, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
You’ll see how to find a pattern you can apply to a given UI problem and how to deconstruct patterns to understand them in depth, including their constraints. UI patterns lead to better use of existing conventions and converging web standards. This book shows you how to spot anti-patterns, how to mix and match patterns, and how they inform design systems.
By helping the non-web professionals and junior web professionals of the world use basic patterns, the web industry can put its best foot forward as new interfaces such as VR/AR/MR, conversational UIs, machine learning, voice input, evolving gestural interactions and more infiltrate the market. Given the emerging popularity of design systems and space of DesignOps, as well as the rise of companies competing on design and usability, now is the time to think about how we use and evolve UI patterns and scale design systems.
Format: kindle, paperback.
by Micah Godbolt, 2016, 195 pages
Imagine what a large-scale web project would look like if frontend development were not treated as an add-on, but as an equal partner with backend development and content strategy. This practical book 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.
Using real-world examples, case studies, and practical tips and tricks throughout, author Micah Godbolt introduces you to the four pillars of frontend architecture. He also provides compelling arguments for developers who want to embrace the mantle of frontend architect and fight to make it a first-class citizen in their next project.
Format: kindle, paperback.
by Christopher Alexander, 1977, 1171 pages
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.
At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.
At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain “languages,” which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment.
Format: kindle, audiobook, paperback.