Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology which meets the demands of massive connectivity in future wireless networks. Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is a popular code-domain NOMA technique. The effectiveness of SCMA comes from: (1) the multi-dimensional sparse codebooks offering high shaping gain and (2) sophisticated multi-user detection based on message passing algorithm (MPA). The codebooks of the users play the main role in determining the performance of SCMA system. This paper presents a framework to design the codebooks by taking into account the entire system including the SCMA encoder and the MPA-based detector. The symbol-error rate (SER) is considered as the design criterion which needs to be minimized. Differential evolution (DE) is used to carry out the minimization of the SER over the codebooks. The simulation results are presented for various channel models.