What are Design Tokens and why do you need to know about them?
Table Of Content
Collaborative decision-making is valuable, but an outside perspective can help make rational decisions. With the advent of Figma’s new variables update and the increasing number of design tokens and the resultant complexity of the design system, there was a need to audit, re-evaluate and better structure the design system. Since Salesforce first propogated the idea of design tokens, it has been quickly adapted by design system advocates. In the beginning, our design system was all about speed, with perfection to follow.
Technical Engineering
Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. With a current enrollment of approximately 2,423 students (57% female and 43% male, representing more than 50 countries), the College has a student/faculty ratio of 8 to 1. I therefore suggest that we explicitly distinguish between “technical engineering,” “legal engineering,” “economic engineering,” and “ethical engineering” when designing a token system. These are all great to work with, and each comes with its own limitations with regard to support and updates.
Business Advantages of Digital Sustainability
3 Platform agnosticThey are a shortcut to cross-platform for consistent communication between platforms. 1 ScalabilityIt’s much easier to maintain your (multi-brand) design system because you only have one source of truth. They are the pinnacle of Design Tokens in regard to reusability and when used right, they serve a bunch of other tokens. In product design, some of the most used increments are 4px and 8px, and choosing between them is highly connected to how dense your system is. For making Theming easy, on the free version of the Tokens Studio plugin, I split the System Tokens’ colors from the remaining System Tokens. We know the good practices… Keep 80% in neutrals, and 20% colored.
The process
Following the establishment of variables and the mapping of alias tokens to global tokens, we embarked on an extensive screen mapping endeavor. This involved the conversion of color styles into variables, a process that was repeated for components as well. Through this systematic procedure, we gained valuable insights into the usability of variables. Design tokens represent the small, repeated design decisions that make up a design system’s visual style.
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These include updating your product’s design with a design system, covering multiple products or platforms, and streamlining future updates. Conversely, if you don’t have a design system or use hard-coded values, design tokens may not be the best option. Carefully considering these factors can save you time and effort in the long run. Graphic designers are currently the great creators of visual experiences in the world. That's the reason why the digital design field is constantly evolving. New technologies, methodologies, and other elements complement our work as creatives emerge daily.
If at any point these values are changed, the developer would not have to go about changing them in the code. Tokens give values and variables a purpose, stating exactly where they should be used. Base variables are the primitive values in a design language, represented by context-agnostic names. These can be directly used, and are inherited by all other token types (think “purple-500”).
Tokens replace static values, such as hex codes for colour, with self-explanatory names. By assigning values to these tokens or variables, we can control and update these properties in a centralised manner. This orchestration of tokens is crucial in creating a consistent and scalable tokenization framework that can evolve over time.
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The Benefits of Design Tokens for a More Productive Design Process
Design tokens helped them to find solutions for complex problems that appeared in the collaboration of designers and engineers. Check our brief guide to design tokens and boost your team workflow. The Tokenization Revolution marks a transformative phase in the evolution of asset management, offering a glimpse into a future where assets are digital, accessible, and efficiently managed. As blockchain technology and tokenization continue to advance, the potential applications and impact on diverse industries are boundless. This revolution is not merely a technological shift; it's a catalyst for democratizing finance, redefining ownership, and unlocking opportunities for a global audience.
Design Tokens are used in place of hard-coded values and variables in order to ensure flexibility and unity across all product experiences and/or platforms. They are also platform-agnostic so it makes it easier to communicate with developers using these terms. There’s a big open question about dealing with themes inside design tokens. We are using a combination of descriptive (specific) tokens with a purpose (color name –color-blue-1)These two examples can serve as connectors and are a reference to the colors above. It’s rather a complex hierarchy of dozens of design tokens with a very strict, controlled vocabulary and syntax.
Within those design systems, there are design tokens, which we’ll define and discuss in this article. It's Important to filter out and decide which elements can be defined as tokens in order to maintain a clean and clear design system. A good rule would be to examine the number of times an element is used. For example, if the background color of a CTA button is used 10 times in the design, it calls for consistent color usage at every point that a CTA button has been used - this is where tokens come in handy. Imagine auditing your company’s website, Android app, and iOS app and learning that your “Read more” buttons use seven different shades of your brand’s primary color, varying widths, heights, and border radii across these platforms.
A big pro of this approach is that you’re combining into a single token structure rather than completely separating between themes which enables easier restructures/refactors because you essentially have less duplicate code going around. It’s a clear separation, but the downside is more duplicate token code, meaning if you restructure your tokens, you have to apply the same changes in all your themes. Here, we will focus on the design tools part, as Backlight is a tool for building design systems. The designer is now able to can change a style and trigger a build on Github.
Tokens are foundational aspects of constructing a design system. A token can be made out of any element used in a design, like color, text style, spacing, or border-radius. Design tokens were created by the Salesforce design system team.
The reason for this is, that in instances (and variants) of components, you can remove items, but not add them. So if you need a maximum of 3 badges in a component (NEW, SPECIAL PRICE, FEATURED), you have to add all 3 in the base component. The reason is simple, in the case I need to develop a dark-theme e.g., it’s much easier to DUPLICATE the Light-theme set and adjust the overrides I need. E.g. global.background is black and not white in the dark-theme.
💌 Follow me here on Medium for updates on design tokens and Tokens Studio for Figma. Rooms intended to have a relaxing vibe should reference light blue. The rooms represent the components, a relaxing vibe a role-based System Token, and light blue a Primitive Token. The styles presented in the image below can be either used, directly, on a title or paragraph OR referenced from a Component Token (e.g. “button.label”).
For small to medium-sized businesses, the application of targeted local branding strategies can transform... Our team handles all aspects of design, making your ideas a reality. Check the previous pages to analyze and apply design elements in the new ones. Elevation tokens apply to the perceived surface level and shadow.
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