Laying the Foundations: A Deeper Dive into Design Systems for Digital Products
Expanding on Atomic Design Principles to Conquer the Challenges of Dynamic, Feature-Rich Products
This weekend I enjoyed reading the book “Laying the Foundations - a book about design systems”.
This book parallels many of the core ideas of “Atomic Design” - major new concepts are the introduction of a new design system model for digital products (the original Atomic Design book examples were focused around website development).
Atomic Design (Website oriented)
* Pages
* Templates
* Organisms
* Molecules
* Atoms
Laying the Foundations (Digital Product oriented)
* User Journeys
* Screens
* Features
* Patterns
* Components
* Foundation
Foundations in this model are an extension of the style guide concept.
Components will map to the atoms and molecules described in Atomic Design.
Patterns, recurrent solutions to design problems, will be related to organisms.
Unlike the website template described in the Atomic Design model, dynamic screens mays have dozens of outcomes and resulting feature sets.
Finally, user journeys will map out how a feature is used.
The book also talks about the major problems emerging while maintaining a design system which everyone working on such a project should be careful about.
Would recommend this book a quick look after having read Atomic Design.
Hope this was helpful for someone - thanks!