Laying the foundations
Laying the foundations, by Andrew Couldwell, is one of those technical books I got a while ago that I had planned to get into, but then never read until I had an outside motivator (i.e. my friend Sara, for whom I also bought the book). It really took me a long time to start reading it, but when I did I found it offered a lot of discussion topics — basically, the perfect book for a tech book club.
Laying the Foundations is meant as a sort of “primer” on design systems for designers; as such it stays fairly superficial when it comes to explaining the process of building a design system from scratch, especially as it tries to stay tool-agnostic, and focusing instead on things such as how to find allies to implement a design system at your company, how to approach the design process starting from the very bottom (with brand identity foundations), how to choose the best approach to creating a design system based on time/money/other resources.
Things I liked
I loved the focus on foundations and on not caring about the tools. Like every designer, I can get pretty judgemental and opinionated when it comes to the tools I like using, but I recognise that a tool (most probably) won’t save you. I also love to do documentation and maintenance work, and when someone tells me “let’s start from the beginning” I am 100% on board. Way too many of us tend to think big right away, without wanting to worry about the foundations, and Andrew Couldwell does a great job in his book at explaining why you should care about them and why it’s ok (or even recommended) to start your work in Google Docs instead of, say, Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD.
Things I didn’t like
Couldwell’s book leaves a lot of room for improvement — not to say that it’s bad, but it could definitely have been a longer manual, gone more in-depth on certain topics, and offered a better resources section to keep learning. A couple of the chapters seemed superfluous to me because they just skimmed the surface without giving me real, tangible and applicable information.
Specifically, the chapters on the “wholesale” and the “iterative” approaches could have been one bigger chapter that didn’t pit two approaches against each other, since the general conclusion was something along the lines of “actually no one really does the wholesale approach anyway”.
Overall I found that the best way to read this book was to do so with a buddy, so as to discuss the topics with someone else and double-check my gut feelings; what was also useful was to have in the back of my mind a project where I knew I could apply some of the concepts right away. I can see how it could become a practical guide for designers who:
- are at the start of their career and interested in learning more about design systems in an uncomplicated way,
- have no experience in reading or writing code,
- have a small project they are considering building a design system for.
Atomic Design
I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but Brad Frost’s Atomic Design is one of those foundational books that I always heard about, and sort of skimmed, and sort of planned to read someday but never did. It introduced timeless concepts to the way we build, design, and think about websites and their architecture, and because it came up in several conversations I was a part of this year, I’ve finally added it to my TBR list. It’s a short read, so I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year!
Async Newsletter
This quarter I’ve really been trying to find time for more meaningful reading of the (sometimes too many) newsletters I subscribe to. Sometimes that means deleting the ones that don’t serve or interest me anymore, or even unsubscribing, to avoid the guilt-trip of “I’ve got 459 unread newsletters and no time to read them all”.
The Async newsletter is a newsletter I particularly enjoy reading, because it offers some really exciting and interesting perspectives on new work, remote work culture, and async communication; it usually is a long-form essay, rather than a meaningless collection of links the author has dumped into a substack real fast before sending it off to hundreds of subscribers, so I can take my time reading the article and taking notes before archiving the email. No more “that newsletter still had a couple of links I didn’t click on, and I could be missing out”.