Resources & Tools for Design System Designers

References, token tools and color scale generators for the people who build and maintain design systems. Research how other systems name and structure components, manage tokens between Figma and code, and document decisions clearly.

35 resources5 sections

Learn from Public Systems

Study how mature systems structure foundations, components and usage guidance.

Design Systems

Material Design 3

Google's design system, now with M3 Expressive. Reference for components, color roles, motion and Android patterns.

Free

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Apple's official guidance for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and visionOS. Check it before designing any native Apple experience.

Free

Atlassian Design System

Atlassian's foundations, components and content guidelines. A strong reference for dense, collaborative SaaS interfaces.

Free

Carbon Design System

IBM's open-source system with deep usage guidance, data viz and Carbon for AI patterns for chat and agent experiences.

Free

Component Research

The Component Gallery

60 components compared across 95 design systems, with 2,600+ examples. Research naming and patterns before you spec one.

Free

Design Systems Surf

Searchable gallery of real design systems, components and foundations, plus articles. Pro adds templates and audit tools.

Freemium

Start Design Systems

A free hub of blogs, tutorials and podcasts on how design systems work and how to build one.

Free

Tokens and Foundations

Build color scales, set a type scale and manage tokens so they map cleanly to code.

Color Scales

UI Colors

Generate Tailwind-style shade scales from a brand hex and preview them on real UI components. Includes a Figma plugin.

Freemium

Tint & Shade Generator

Generate tints and shades of any color to build out your design system's palette.

Free

OKLCH Color Picker

Evil Martians' OKLCH picker and converter with P3 gamut preview and sRGB fallbacks, for perceptually even palettes.

Free

Accessible Palette

Builds color scales with consistent perceived lightness in CIELAB/LCh, so contrast stays predictable across shades.

Free

Tokens, Type and Handoff

Tokens Studio

Figma plugin and platform for managing design tokens and syncing them with GitHub and code. Built for multi-brand systems.

Freemium

Typescale

Build a modular type scale from a base size and ratio, preview it with real fonts, and export the CSS.

Freemium

Zeplin

Handoff and documentation layer: publish screens from Figma and developers get specs, assets, styles and code snippets.

Freemium

Components and Code

Keep your Figma library aligned with the components and icons engineers actually ship.

Component Libraries

shadcn/ui

Open-source React components on Radix/Base UI and Tailwind that you copy into your codebase. The baseline for most SaaS UIs.

Free

Untitled UI

Figma design system with 10,000+ components and variants, a matching open-source React library and an icon set.

Freemium

Magic UI

150+ free animated React components built with Tailwind and Motion, designed as a companion to shadcn/ui.

Freemium

Figma Community UI Kits

Thousands of free and paid UI kits on Figma Community, including official kits from Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Freemium

Icon Systems

Lucide

Open-source stroke icon set (1,800+ icons, ISC license) with packages for React, Vue, Svelte and more. The default icons in shadcn/ui.

Free

Phosphor Icons

Flexible open-source icon family in six weights, thin to duotone, with Figma plugin and React, Vue, Swift and Flutter packages.

Free

Iconify

Search 170,000+ open-source icons from 200+ sets in one place, with each set's license shown. Also available as a Figma plugin.

Free

Streamline

450,000+ assets across 40+ consistent icon families, from minimal Core to hand-drawn Freehand. Free sets plus Pro.

Freemium

Accessibility

Build accessible defaults into the system so every product team inherits them.

Standards

WCAG 2.2 Quick Reference

W3C's filterable list of every WCAG 2.2 success criterion with techniques. The source of truth for compliance checks.

Free

The A11y Project

Community-run accessibility checklist, patterns and resources in plain language. A fast first stop for a11y questions.

Free

WebAIM

Accessibility nonprofit with practical articles, a contrast checker and the WAVE evaluator. Use it to test and explain issues.

Free

Testing Tools

Stark

Accessibility suite with Figma and Sketch plugins and browser extensions for contrast checks, vision simulation and audits.

Freemium

APCA Contrast Calculator

Checks text contrast with APCA, the perceptual model developed for WCAG 3, with guidance tied to font size and weight.

Free

WebAIM Contrast Checker

The reference WCAG 2 contrast checker. Enter two colors and get AA/AAA pass or fail for normal text, large text and UI.

Free

Documentation and Growth

Write guidelines teams will follow, and keep building your own systems skills.

Content Standards

Ditto

Product copy management with AI drafting and style-guide checks, plus an MCP server for AI coding tools.

Paid

Learning

Memorisely

Live, hands-on bootcamps in UI, UX research, design systems and AI design engineering, taught inside real tools.

Paid

Figma Learn Courses

Figma's official courses, from Figma Design for beginners to design systems and prototyping.

Free

Practical UI

Adham Dannaway's 373-page book of logic-driven UI guidelines, bundled with a Figma design system starter kit.

Paid

Other toolkits

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