What do you think?
Rate this book
A Book Apart #31
Expressive Design Systems
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.
138 pages, Paperback
Published November 21, 2019
25 people are currently reading
443 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 23, 2021
A great, quick, dense read. Better if you’re new to design systems, but valuable even if you’re not. My copy is full of notes on phrasing I want to use, or activities I want to try. A great approach to design system work.
December 2, 2019
Yesenia provides a thoughtful and deliberate approach to enabling expression and variation in a design system. Her clear examples demystify much of a designers’ thought process and outlines the borders of a system where creativity can flourish. One of the best books for people working with design systems!
March 26, 2020
A brief, yet insightful look into what goes behind the scenes when creating a design system.
March 14, 2021
This book is a great start to make design systems work in organisations. And it's fairly quick read so you can quickly start to bring the lessons learned in practice. Most advice is practical and to the point. A seasoned designer might already know most of the subjects discussed by Yesenia and will miss some depth but I think it's always valuable to see the subjects organised in a book. Sometimes you know a lot but need to be reminded what is the right moment to implement something. Then this book can help.
February 16, 2021
A wonderful summary of design systems. It feels like an expansion on Brad Frost's atomic design, but details more on how to make it flexible enough to work. Maybe Brad tried to do that too but atomic gets mucked up in the language.
December 10, 2019
Brief, straight-to-the-point guide to craft design systems that are purposeful, meaningful, and scalable.
Through examples mainly from Vox Media and Shopify, Yesenia eloquently articulates a framework to embed brand elements into a design system.
Through examples mainly from Vox Media and Shopify, Yesenia eloquently articulates a framework to embed brand elements into a design system.
July 12, 2024
Good book for beginners
The book is great if you've never built a design system but have some basic understanding of it.
Perhaps some more visuals about the design systems and how components are organized and documented would have been helpful.
The book is great if you've never built a design system but have some basic understanding of it.
Perhaps some more visuals about the design systems and how components are organized and documented would have been helpful.
November 25, 2019
Essential for any designer who works with other designers from the years of 2019-2040
July 11, 2020
Practical and eye opening guide to how to think about creating an actually good design system from end to end.
Read
September 7, 2020After reading this book I have a much better understanding of the design system we use at work.
June 26, 2021
Not very insightful if you already know a few things about Design Systems.
Read
December 27, 2021A really well written dive into what makes a design system more than just a collection of components. Every team responsible for for a design system at any scale should give this a read.
December 20, 2023
So many scribbled “yes!” in the margins. Clarified why last employer’s design system was so hard to work with.
Read
July 20, 2025 It’s alright, but had hoped for some better arguments to persuade stakeholders into making a design system in the first place.
April 8, 2021
I love books. But what I love even more is short books full of great content. Expressive Design Systems fall in this category.
The chapters are well organized and flow smoothly, from the initial diagnosis and thinking process to working on a design system and later on managing it. I loved how Yesenia shares her experience working on design systems at Vox and Shopify with practical advices.
Extracts:
“Design systems create better products when they provide both unity and cohesion. Unity means that things feel complete—all of your brand elements work together as one. But unity doesn’t guarantee cohesion. Cohesion is the quality that makes your user interfaces easy to understand across the experience.”
“Defining your purpose statement up front helps you prioritize and make decisions later on. If you have to choose between building an average experience that only uses reusable components or an excellent experience that requires new or adjusted components, how will you decide?”
“Even though component libraries and style guides are the most visible outcomes of a system, it’s important to start with your purpose. A design system that has a solid purpose and principles, even with just a handful of components, will be more cohesive and dynamic than a system with hundreds of components but no shared purpose, principles, or foundation.”
On deciding which information to include in a book preview component used in a list: “How relevant is the publication date to the action the user is taking?”
“”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan,” said Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Remember that components aren’t used in isolation, but around and within each other.”
“Thinking of our design systems in terms of layers that change at different frequencies can help us support variation in a scalable way. For instance, changing your underlying brand principles would mean that every other part of your system would need to change, too. Changing your grid would impact layouts.”
“Some say the greatest risk to a design system is lack of adoption—but rapid adoption without a plan for how you’ll maintain the system is just as dangerous.”
“When you create an expressive design system, you’re not just creating reusable components—you’re operationalizing design across an organization.”
“Successful design systems have three major parts: components, guidelines for how the components can be used, and a governance model that unifies the teams that use and contribute to the system.”
“Remember Gall’s law, which John Gall suggested in his book Systemantics as a rule of thumb for building systems: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
The chapters are well organized and flow smoothly, from the initial diagnosis and thinking process to working on a design system and later on managing it. I loved how Yesenia shares her experience working on design systems at Vox and Shopify with practical advices.
Extracts:
“Design systems create better products when they provide both unity and cohesion. Unity means that things feel complete—all of your brand elements work together as one. But unity doesn’t guarantee cohesion. Cohesion is the quality that makes your user interfaces easy to understand across the experience.”
“Defining your purpose statement up front helps you prioritize and make decisions later on. If you have to choose between building an average experience that only uses reusable components or an excellent experience that requires new or adjusted components, how will you decide?”
“Even though component libraries and style guides are the most visible outcomes of a system, it’s important to start with your purpose. A design system that has a solid purpose and principles, even with just a handful of components, will be more cohesive and dynamic than a system with hundreds of components but no shared purpose, principles, or foundation.”
On deciding which information to include in a book preview component used in a list: “How relevant is the publication date to the action the user is taking?”
“”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan,” said Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Remember that components aren’t used in isolation, but around and within each other.”
“Thinking of our design systems in terms of layers that change at different frequencies can help us support variation in a scalable way. For instance, changing your underlying brand principles would mean that every other part of your system would need to change, too. Changing your grid would impact layouts.”
“Some say the greatest risk to a design system is lack of adoption—but rapid adoption without a plan for how you’ll maintain the system is just as dangerous.”
“When you create an expressive design system, you’re not just creating reusable components—you’re operationalizing design across an organization.”
“Successful design systems have three major parts: components, guidelines for how the components can be used, and a governance model that unifies the teams that use and contribute to the system.”
“Remember Gall’s law, which John Gall suggested in his book Systemantics as a rule of thumb for building systems: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews