10 Best Articles on Design Systems
The most useful articles on design systems from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Design Systems Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on design systems by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on design systems—all under 10 minutes.
How Pinterest’s design systems team measures adoption
The Gestalt team tells us how they used Figma’s REST API to create FigStats, a dashboard for visualizing component usage.
The future of design systems is complicated
We talked to several industry experts about how they’re managing the future of design systems—from the future of tooling to automation to accessibility.
“What is a Design System?” an article by Dan Mall
6 different types of design systems.
«A set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.»
10 Things No One Told Me About Design Systems
This UX designer learned the hard way, but you don’t have to.
How Pinterest’s design systems team measures adoption
The Gestalt team tells us how they used Figma’s REST API to create FigStats, a dashboard for visualizing component usage.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on design systems.
How we built our multi-platform design system at Booking.com
Building a design system that works is a challenge at any scale. Building a design system for 150+ product teams, used by 200+ designers…
The best design system is no system
To meet expanding needs, designers turn to design systems to streamline design with the hopes of providing value at lower cost and effort…
Design Systems at Alibaba
How we built an RTL-first design system and maintained it during a major redesign
Design Systems: Useful Examples and Resources — Smashing Magazine
Everything design systems on accessibility, enterprise design systems, Figma kits, data visualization, motion design, multi-lingual design, naming, ROI calculator and UX writing.
Surviving Design Systems
Keeping yourself and a Design System alive long-term with effective maintenance and some fresh motivation.
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Design Systems, including:
UX Collective
Curated stories on user experience, usability, and product design. By @fabriciot and @caioab.
Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈
An online magazine for designers and web developers. Questions? We've got your back: @SmashingSupport, @SmashingConf. Curated by Iris, Vitaly and the team.
Brad Frost
Design system consultant, web designer, speaker, writer, musician, & artist. Author of Atomic Design. Mastadon: http://mastodon.social/@brad_frost
Bit
Build composable apps and features with Bit components. Split and distribute development to easily scale it → http://bit.dev → http://bit.cloud → http://youtube.com/c/Bitdev/videos
UX Planet
http://uxplanet.org official twitter account
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Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
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It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
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How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor on design systems?
We monitor hundreds of sources on design systems, including UX Collective, Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈, Brad Frost, Bit, UX Planet, and many more.
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