Whether you're kicking off a new project, a rebrand, or simply curious about how to make your design system better, here are a few resources that I've found helpful and/or inspiring along my journey:

Research

Get a jump start with an overview of what others are doing.

• Component.gallery, a solid collection of design systems and component libraries. Really helpful when researching potential third party libraries, or inspiration for building your components: https://component.gallery/

I may already be behind in terms of what the new hotness is by the time I post this, but here are a few I've been inspired by:

• Radix
• Shadcn
• Headless UI
• Panda
• React Aria
• Ark-ui

Token Maintenance/Tooling

• Components.ai, a suite of design tools to help generate tokens. They offer the ability to export your theme in different web formats (CSS, CSS Variables, JavaScript, JSON, Sass variables, and JSON (raw schema) ): https://components.ai

• Design System Tokens Format Module,this reference isn't as visually fun, and it isn't an offical W3C standard yet, but it provides some good guidance on how tokens should be structured, in case you need a place to jump off from: https://www.designtokens.org/tr/2025.10/format/.

• Style Dictionary, I actually haven't used this tool directly, but I believe I will have to eventually! For now, I know about it, and that it can export your tokens to a variety of platforms! It looks like there are also a few tools that integrate Style Dictionary with Figma. (ie: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@figma-export/output-styles-as-style-dictionary) https://styledictionary.com/

Icons

• Figma Export, This tool not only can export a style dictionary, but I've used this tool to export our icons from Figma. The tool was extremely helpful in exporting the over 2000 svgs we had for our Figma icon library. Once I had the svgs, I was able to write a node script to generate the svgs as React components so they could inherit all of the styling capabilities that our other components had. https://github.com/marcomontalbano/figma-export

Media to Stay Relevant

• Smashing Magazine, Smashing Magazine is probably most directly relevant to my interests and focus on Design Systems and frontend engineering. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
• Figma's Blog, Not as engineering focused, but provides good insight into what designers are thinking about. https://www.figma.com/blog/design-systems/
• Zeroheight's Design Systems WTF Podcast, Great for some passive listening, there aren't many tech deep dives, but most topics are great high level questions on design systems. https://zeroheight.com/podcast/design-systems-wtf/
• CSS Podcast, this definitely requires a little more active listening for me-- expect a little more technical deep dives and fun opinions from Una Kravets and Bramus Van Damme. https://thecsspodcast.libsyn.com/