Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice

by Dan Mall, Meredith Black (Foreword)

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable.

Genres: Design

234 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 28, 2023

Reviews

[Emily Carlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY very very pragmatic, clear, useful. Refreshingly practice > theory.

[Chris Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book disappointed me.

It is really targeted towards very large design teams at very, very large organisations that are building static websites. Designers working alone or in small groups and/or on complex products and non-website software will have to take a different approach, if only by wearing simultaneously the many hats that Mall talks about.

The book also takes long detours into Agile methodology and DesignOps, which I found tangentially related at best. And at least for the kind of products I design, I absolutely disagree with a “code first” approach — it’s surprising to me that any designer would advocate for this. On the other hand, the simple websites on which the book focuses do not require as much work in user research, task analysis, and resulting detailed requirements, use cases, and usability testing as the domains I’ve focused on in my career.

Towards the end of the book, there are pages and pages and pages of photos of a store selling Lego blocks.

There is some good advice here, but it’s buried in a longer book that could have used some rewriting, editing, and better focus — would have made a great couple of articles.

Not to my taste was the colloquial language and dad-joke-level humour.

Tempted to dock an extra star for using ‘sic’ on an English spelling (internalise).

Not up to Rosenfeld Media’s usual high standards.

[Lake · Rating 5 out of 5]

A worthwhile book if you’re trying to manoeuvre the more strategic side of gaining design system adoption. A lot of great nuggets of wisdom that is directly applicable to my line of work in trying to establish a design system in an organization that has never had one before. Definitely a worthy book if you’re trying to grow your organization’s design maturity if there was no design capacity beforehand.

[Keith Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice high-level view of design systems, covering the who, what, when, how and why of their use, presenting a solid case towards their value to an org and how to get going if you’ve not started, and presenting a lot of advice for those who are already on their design system journey.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-balanced read including strategic and tactical items to keep in mind when investing in a longer-term practice for design systems. I enjoyed the case study interviews and practical examples with visuals of actual systems.Recommend for a variety of roles/backgrounds.