The 2018 Faraday Discussion on "Designing Nanoparticle Systems for Catalysis" brought together leading scientists to discuss the current state-of-the-art in the fields of computational chemistry, characterization techniques, and nanomaterial synthesis, and to debate the challenges and opportunities going forward for rational catalyst design. The meeting was a vivid discussion of how the communities accummulate knowledge and on how innovativeness can be combined to have a stronger scientific impact. In the following, we provide an overview of the meeting structure, including plenaries, papers, discussion points and breakout sessions, and we hope to show, to the wider scientific community, that there is great value in continued international discussion and scientific collaboration in these fields.