Friday, May 3, 2024

What Are Design Tokens?

design token

It is available as a CLI through NPM, but can also be used like any normal node module if you want to extend its functionality. It can generate different output formats like variables for the common CSS preprocessors like Sass, Stylus, and Less. This makes it easy to grow your design and keep it consistent across all platforms, like Web, iOS, and Android.

How I name Design Tokens and Components

He was originally voiced by Trey Parker, later changed to series art director, storyboard artist and producer Adrien Beard. Originally the character was named "Token Williams" and then "Token Black", as a play on Tokenism. His name was retconned in the episode "The Big Fix" to Tolkien, named after J. Design systems promise consistency, efficiency, and scalability, but realizing these benefits hinges on widespread usage. To get your entire team on board, you’ll need to tap into your inner marketer and craft a compelling adoption strategy.

State of Design Tokens 2024 Report

design token

Allow yourself to play around (the table is really good for it), test a lot, explore new looks and styles just by changing REW, SCALE and scales. A good strategy is to create base components with maximum complexity. Let’s say a product card that includes all possible badges, banners, price tags and specifications — aka the “worst case” complexity.

đźš‘ Design tokens to the rescue

Molecules are combinations of atoms, organisms are combinations of molecules, and so on. Design tokens are the single source of truth to name and store design decisions. However, as far as I know, design tokens generator such as Theo can only be used at the moment by developers since design tools can’t communicate natively with design tokens generators. Currently only Sketch could do that as it exports its data in JSON. As a front-end developer, I assume designers are responsible for taking design decisions. Updating a color, a font-size or any “core style” and seeing the result in whatever platform should be effortless for them.

Use tokens in code

Dive into the key takeaways from Supernova's expert panel on the state of design tokens in 2024. Explore insightful discussions on collaboration, token management, layout theming, and more. Get the latest insights on design tokens trends and best practices.

Easy maintenance.

Import your design system’s components or an open-source component library with UXPin Merge to create a single source of truth across your organization. Learn more about Merge and how to request access to this revolutionary design technology. Design tokens are central and tiny pieces of UI information to store design related information such as colors, fonts, spaces, animations, etc... Their benefits is that they can be transformed and formatted to meet the needs of any platform (Android, iOS, Web, etc…). I then may create, depending on the needs of the project, some interactive patterns such as the primary action color and all its states (default, hover, active, focus, and disabled). With it, I am allowed to reference these states, individually and as needed, in different components (buttons, toggle switches, buttons group, tabs, …) or in other System Tokens (e.g. Links).

Streamline Your Frontend Development with The Design Token Generators: Explore the Guides and Tutorials

2) The design tool updates design tokens files according to targeted platform. The benefit of design tokens is the ability to create at scale with consistency. The key to design tokens is that they facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. More people on a team can understand and use design values without specificity, but with accuracy. Now that you understand the basics, we can move on to the more sophisticated names.

How do I create a design token?

Each token is a quoted string or, with only the exceptions of 1px and 2px, a unitless number — and the mechanism by which the final display value is unlocked is a function, mixin, or utility class. Documentation tokensYou can create an artboard with the list of your tokens. Everything will be updated whenever you update the name, raw value, value (with all aliases resolved), and description. Reference Shadow/TypeCreate type decisions and then connect them with multiple themes, so you don’t have to recreate anything.

Design systems make it possible to save time, increase transparency, and collaborate effectively with employees at all levels of an organization. Here we are using a combination of descriptive (specific) tokens with a purpose (color name –color-blue-400).These two examples can serve as connectors and are a reference to the colors above. Usually, teams spend a lot of brain power finding the perfect logic. You can find inspiration in other open design systems, but that doesn’t mean it will work for you. I recommend a workshop to find the most optimal structure for your use case.

How the Arbitrum Foundation designed the distribution strategy for their token airdrop - Nansen

How the Arbitrum Foundation designed the distribution strategy for their token airdrop.

Posted: Wed, 21 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Once designers define design tokens in Figma, they can export them as a JSON or other format and then integrate them into various development workflows and tools. This allows developers to easily access and apply the design tokens in their code, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of errors. For example, you can use “colorPrimary” value for the background of a button, the border color of a form input field, and the text color of a heading.

Now, they're the smallest but most important part of any design system. They're like the building blocks of your design language, making sure your brand looks the same across all platforms. Instead of using hard codes like color hex codes or pixel sizes, we give them names.

We’re also introducing gradient variables, allowing you to bind color variables directly to each stop in a gradient. The redesigned gradients panel provides more control over individual gradient stops, making it easier than ever to create and manage beautiful, flexible gradients. In this session, Verizon Design Systems Leads Talia Fisher and Kshitij Tambe shed light on how their team implemented variables and how it’s helping them take their design system to the next level. Read more about Code Connect, a feature built to improve design system adoption by making code more accessible and useful for developers.

A token can be a color, font style, unit of white space, or even a motion animation designed for a specific need. So, while setting things up on the design side, consider the impact of how complex your groups are. If anything else, I feel one shouldn’t overcomplicate the names of our tokens and rather keep them simple.

It must use a predictable naming convention so users can easily find tokens and scale the system. For more complex elements, like shadows and type, alias tokens condense many values into one easily digestible format. Component Tokens are component-specific tokens, used to tailor their individual styles. The benefits are that if you need to tweak the border-color of a checkbox, you can fine-tune it in isolation from the other form elements. As Systems designers, it is our duty to optimize at scale the experiences of Designer and Developers when consuming our product; the system itself.

This means that a Token needs to reference multiple Tokens to be created. So far, Design Tokens were ONLY stored in a JSON file and handed to developers to convert to CSS, SASS, SCSS, SWIFT, etc. Token names follow a strict naming convention that communicates when and where this token is supposed to be used without having to look at its underlying value. These are the raw values in code such as color values (HEX, rgba), absolute and relative length units, percentages, numbers, etc.

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