Awesome Design Systems Overview

📒 A curated list of bookmarks, resources and articles about design systems focused on developers.

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Awesome Design Systems

A curated list of bookmarks, resources and articles about design systems focused on developers.

Design systems
UI Design tools
Design tokens
Pattern library
AI and design systems
Testing
Books
Talks

Design systems

A Design System is an ever evolving collection of reusable components, guided by rules that ensure consistency and speed, by being the single source of truth for any product development.

Design systems of some "known" companies

Atlassian Design Guidelines - End-to-end design language to create straightforward and beautiful experiences.
Firefox Acorn Design System - Launch recognizable, enjoyable Firefox products and features faster.
GitHub Primer - Open-source it to allow the community to design and build their own projects.
GitLab Design System - Pajamas - Resources, components, and design guidelines behind GitLab.
Google Material Design - Create intuitive and beautiful products with Material Design.
IBM Carbon - Carbon is IBM's open-source design system for products and experiences.
Shopify Polaris - Our design system helps us work together to build a great experience for all of Shopify's merchants.

See more design systems here (⭐26k)!

Design systems articles

More resources

Design system checklist - Build better design systems. An open-source checklist to help you plan, build and grow your design system.
Design Systems Survey - Designers and developers from more than 20 industries tell us about their design systems and their uses.
Design.system - Resources for the design systems community.
Super friendly - We help in-house teams make better digital products with design systems.

UI Design tools

Design tools

Figma - Helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish (cross-platform).
Sketch - A design toolkit built to help you create your best work from your earliest ideas, through to final artwork (for macOS).
AdobeXD - Share your story with designs that look and feel like the real thing. Wireframe, animate, prototype, collaborate, and more — it’s all right here, all in one UI/UX design tool.
Marvel - Everything you need to bring ideas to life and transform how you create digital products with your team. Placing the power of design in everyone’s hands.
UXPin - Design and manage your entire UX/UI project in one tool.
Penpot - The first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams.
Lunacy - A free graphic design tool with offline mode, built-in assets (icons, illustrations, photos), and real-time collaboration. Great alternative to Sketch and Figma (macOS, Windows, Linux).

See design tools plugins here (⭐42k)!

Integrations

Abstract - Design collaboration without the chaos (for Sketch and XD on macOS).
Zeplin - The better way to share, organize and collaborate on designs—built with developers in mind.

Stark - Empowers you to design with accessibility in mind from conception of brand to fruition of product. Contrast checker, colorblind simulation and color suggestions.
The A11Y Project - A community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier. See resources section.
InclusiveColors palette creator - Creates accessible custom Tailwind-style color palettes that pass WCAG contrast checks and can be exported to CSS/Figma/Adobe.

Design tools articles

Adobe XD vs Sketch vs Figma vs InVision - How to Pick the Best Design Software in 2020

Design tokens

Design Tokens W3C Community Group - View repository on GitHub here (⭐2.2k)!
Design Tokens Format Module 2025.10 - First stable version of the Design Tokens Community Group specification, with format, color and resolver modules.
Diez - Free & open-source developer toolkit for expressing visual styles that can be shared across codebases, native platforms, and teams (no longer maintained).
Design Tokens Validator - Validate your design tokens against the Design Token Community Group spec.

Plugins

Abstract Connect (⭐7) - A Design tokens extractor for devs using Abstract & JavaScript.
Tokens Studio - Manage design tokens in Figma and keep them in sync with your code repository.
Zeplin JSON export tokens - Design tokens Zeplin extension to generate your tokens in JSON format.

Tools

Figmagic (⭐863) - Generate design tokens, export graphics, and extract design token-driven React components from your Figma documents.
Style Dictionary (⭐4.9k) - A Style Dictionary uses design tokens to define styles once and use those styles on any platform or language.
Superposition - Extract design tokens from websites and use them in code and in your design tool. Use the design system you already have.
Terrazzo - Generate code for web, mobile and native apps from design tokens JSON in the Design Tokens Community Group format.
Theo (⭐2k) - An abstraction for transforming and formatting Design Tokens (archived, superseded by Style Dictionary).

Articles

See more design tokens info here (⭐1.3k)!

Pattern library

Styleguides and documentation

Stencil - Toolchain for building reusable, scalable Design Systems.
Zeroheight - Create beautiful living styleguides and document all your design system resources in one place. Learn about this.

Develop isolated components

Backlight - Collaborative platform to build Design Systems on the code side. Empower your front-end with an all-in-one solution to manage components. Quick start, speed-up collaboration.
Pattern Lab - Helps you and your team build thoughtful, pattern-driven user interfaces using atomic design principles.
React Styleguidist - Isolated React component development environment with a living style guide.
Storybook - Build bulletproof UI components faster. Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.
Styled System - A collection of utility functions that add style props to your React components and allows you to control styles based on a global theme object.

Storybook addons

Accessibility - Test component compliance with web accessibility standards.
Actions - Get UI feedback when an action is performed on an interactive element.
Backgrounds - Switch backgrounds to view components in different settings.
Docs - Document component usage and properties in Markdown.
Links - Link stories together to build demos and prototypes with your UI components.
Source - View a story's source code to see how it works and paste into your app.
Viewport - Build responsive components by adjusting Storybook's viewport size and orientation.
Vitest - Run every story as a Vitest test, with interaction, accessibility and visual checks.

More info to Storybook here (⭐424)!

Component patterns

ARIA Authoring Practices Guide patterns - Reference patterns from the W3C for building accessible components, with keyboard interaction and working examples.
Open UI - W3C Community Group that researches how design systems name and build components, and proposes new native HTML controls.
The Component Gallery - Up-to-date repository of interface components based on examples from real design systems.

Headless component libraries

Ark UI - Unstyled, accessible components for your design system that work in React, Vue, Solid and Svelte.
Base UI - Unstyled components for building accessible design systems, from the creators of Radix, Floating UI and Material UI.
Radix Primitives - Open-source component library for building high-quality, accessible design systems and web apps.
React Aria - Accessible components and hooks with behavior, internationalization and no imposed styles, by Adobe.
shadcn/ui - Composable, accessible components you copy into your codebase and own, distributed through a registry.

Pattern libraries articles

AI and design systems

Tools and formats that make a design system readable by coding agents.

DESIGN.md (⭐29k) - Format specification for describing a visual identity and design system to coding agents.
Figma Code Connect (⭐1.6k) - Connects design system components in code with their counterparts in Figma, so developers and agents get real snippets.
Figma Console MCP (⭐3.3k) - MCP server that connects AI assistants to Figma for design system extraction, creation and debugging.
Figma MCP server - Official server that gives AI agents the design context of your Figma files to generate code, and lets them write back to the canvas.
Storybook MCP addon - Helps agents write and test stories for your UI components.

Testing

Unit & Regression test

Chromatic - Visual testing for React, Angular and Vue. Chromatic ensures consistency in UI components, down to the pixel. Every commit is automatically tested for visual changes in the cloud.
Sherlo - Visual testing platform for React Native Storybook. Captures screenshots on iOS and Android simulators in the cloud and detects visual changes automatically.
Testing library - Simple and complete testing utilities that encourage good testing practices.

Books

Atomic Design - Methodology for creating design systems by Brad Frost.
Building Design Systems - Unify user experiences through a shared design language by Sarrah Vesselov and Taurie Davis.
Design systems - A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products by Alla Kholmatova (Smashing Magazine).
Front-End Style Guides - Creating and maintaining style guides for websites by Anna Debenham.
Frontend Architecture for Design Systems - A modern blueprint for scalable and sustainable websites by Micah Godbolt.
Introduction to Design Systems - A practical introduction to design systems by using React, Figma and Storybook by Emma Bostian.
Modular Web Design - Creating Reusable Components for user experience design and documentation by Nathan Curtis.

Talks

Building Accessible Interfaces: Patterns And Techniques - Will be building and refactoring common UI components, and share a couple of techniques she often uses to build with accessibility in mind by Sara Soueidan.
Design Processes & Systems in Craft - Design shouldn't be a siloed practice, but a collaborative effort rooted in process. How do we get there? In this session, we'll look at how we can reframe our design approach to be more human-centric and systems-minded by Courtney Bradford.
Design Systems - The State of the Web - Conversation about the role of design systems in modern web development and how they can change the dynamics between designer and developer by Adam Argyle (Design Advocate at Google).
Design Systems - Women of React conf by Neha Sharma.
Introducing Design Systems Into Chaos - Shares practical examples on where to begin to set up a design system, what to prioritize, and how to make a big impact to customers and colleagues, to help you introduce systems that bring order to chaos by Diana Mounter (Design Systems Lead at GitHub).
Jina Anne - Designing a Design System - Will share strategies for how to approach, design and build an effective design system; how to successfully maintain the system to ensure ongoing usefulness by Jina (Lead Designer on the Design Systems team at Salesforce UX).
Level up your Design System with styled-system - Women of React conf by Taley'a Mirza.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.