(Book Review) Design Systems for the Web, 1st Edition


Overview

Review Published: April, 2019.

From Jim Keller comes a guide for developing and maintaining design systems for the web.

Encompassing various strategies such as formulating an initial design approach, designing actual components, and how to scale your design system, this book offers a brief overview from the author’s more than 20 years of front-line experience.


Rating:

4 / 5

Four out of five.

(Great Content, Presentation is Clear)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Intermediate (Previous knowledge of design systems is needed).


Length:

43 pages.


Where to Buy It:

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What's Good

  • Simplified overview of design systems and their practical benefits; the author succinctly discusses the benefits of well built design systems, how to simplify the process for successful implementation, and outlines common challenges that can be solved with those simplified techniques.
  • Speaks from experience; the author’s experiences of working with design systems in a busy production environment lend this book a certain pragmatism that helps to simplify the design system process (i.e. making is much easier to sell it to stakeholders).
  • Well-written & approachable; although you’ll get more out of this book by being familiar with design systems and how they generally work (I’d recommend taking a look at "Atomic Design” to get the basics down), it does a good job of presenting information in an easy-to-digest way that even beginners can get something from.

What Can Be Improved

  • Design systems across technologies; while the techniques presented can be easily adapted to design systems for other types of projects (i.e. native apps, custom digital experiences, etc.), a brief examination of any unique challenges that a UX designer would have to face would be fantastic.
  • References & further reading; this book sets the stage by assuming you’ve read “Atomic Design”, but apart from that doesn’t offer any other resources you could investigate when it comes to building a successful design system (i.e. a brief overview of the “Atomic Design” methodology for comparison, and some framework resources for implementation would round this book out nicely).

The Bottom Line

  • A useful distillation of design systems for getting stakeholder/team buy-in; by outlining the benefits of properly maintained design systems, this book is more useful for educating stakeholders and project team members to a crucial part of the UX design process than more detailed resources.
  • A good read for beginner-to-intermediate UX designers to get a better grip on design systems; this book is designed to be a practical layer of simplified principles and techniques for presenting design systems to team members and stakeholders, and in this scope it does very well (but I’d recommend taking a look at “Atomic Design” before reading this book so you have a full understanding of design systems before you use this book to optimize that approach).
  • It’s free; I bought this from Amazon before realizing it was available for free (yup, I’m a genius), but I still don’t feel bad for having spent the money, so I’m willing to bet you’d want this in your library for the bargain price of $0.