What Are Design Tokens? And Why Should You Use Them Blog

Table Of Content

• Layers of Design Tokens
• Want to take the design of your site to the next level?
• How Luminary has used Design Tokens
• What is a Design Token? Understanding Its Significance in Scalable Design Systems
• Realizing the Potential of Digital and Physical Assets:
• Boosting Design Efficiency. How Figma for VS Code Integration Streamlines Workflow
• Tokenization Revolution: Transforming Assets in the Digital Age

Read more + It's a tall task, however, to find a partner who understands your business’s unique needs. Unlock the full potential of your design system with Supernova, empowering you to drive innovation, collaboration, and seamless scalability. Hire us to create cutting-edge UX/UI designs thatcaptivate, engage, and convert. These are the raw values in code such as color values (HEX, rgba), absolute and relative length units, percentages, numbers, etc. The way to organize a robust and extensible Token architecture depends on how many levels of abstraction you would like to have.

Layers of Design Tokens

With the plugin, you can edit the token, or add a new one, apply it, and that’s it. Or, if you are comfortable coding, use the .json tab and bulk edit all the tokens. In my last article, I talked about how to do the roundtrip of one single design token from Figma to code and back — and why this is so significant in the design-development-process and the goal of a single source of truth. 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).

Want to take the design of your site to the next level?

They should reference System Tokens so that when the “color.action.background” is overridden by, I.E., a dark-theme color, all components referencing it will change accordingly. Using JSON format to encode values can help you adjust design options quickly and easily for multiple preprocessors, including SaaS. JSON files can also be an efficient asset for data interchange between web applications and servers, making it a smart solution for those who want fast, qualified transmission.

How Luminary has used Design Tokens

However, what about the internal aspects of the design and development process? Can a design system alone ensure the effective provision of all involved channels? Although employing a design system is a step in the right direction, it has its own drawbacks that become apparent when designs are transferred to the front end or undergo changes. In order to avoid such discrepancies, businesses should make use of design system tokens. This element consists of several parts, each of which is represented by a design token. Those elements allow the developer to build and modify the button's visual characteristics globally.

What is a Design Token? Understanding Its Significance in Scalable Design Systems

For more on how our spacing system, and how to use space in your designs, see our spacing foundation. Use opacity.disabled for interactive images that are disabled (such as disabled avatar), and opacity.loading to content sitting underneath a loading spinner.

Token Engineering: A Blueprint for Building Sustainable Decentralized Economies - hackernoon.com

Token Engineering: A Blueprint for Building Sustainable Decentralized Economies.

Posted: Tue, 09 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The rule is, if it's not inside a component, then feel free to use these system tokens directly on your text. This is due to the fact that while working on components, we want to ensure our top-level name is the actual component’s name. While with the System Tokens, we are mainly describing roles for our styles, here we can be very specific and make our lives easier.

In the above example, we make the $value of the token an object, which defines the different values for each theme. Continuing our example of a tokenized input component, let’s imagine an extension called input-amount, which has a fixed width of 200px. If you want to get more details on the design token spec, do check out the spec.Given how fast it is being iterated upon, this blog will get outdated quickly. 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.

Boosting Design Efficiency. How Figma for VS Code Integration Streamlines Workflow

The terms “design” and “engineering” are closely related but not the same. The term “engineering design” is used to describe the part of the engineering process which is open-ended and ultimately more subjective. The term describes a set of creativity techniques for problem-solving of novel topics that are solution oriented, yet holistic in their approach. The process includes problem definition, ideation, solution-focused strategies, modeling, prototyping, testing, and evaluating, including iterative feedback loops, with a particular focus on user-centered or human-centered design.

Tokenization Revolution: Transforming Assets in the Digital Age

We designed multiple option sets, gathered feedback from both designers and developers, and refined our approach based on this feedback. As we progressed, we created our global color palette, which serves as the overarching framework for colors. We then meticulously aligned these global colors with alias colors, ensuring that the nomenclature was easily understandable to our fellow designers. When creating a token system, one first needs to decide whether to create a token using an existing blockchain network and other Web3 infrastructure, or if the token can be deployed on an existing blockchain infrastructure. While most token projects today chose to build on top of an existing blockchain infrastructure — most dominantly the Ethereum network — some use cases for purpose-driven tokens that steer DAOs have chosen to build their own blockchain network. The advantage of building one’s own blockchain network is that one can create an infrastructure with the exact technical properties that one needs.

Design tokens are named entities that store visual design attributes in an agnostic, human-readable abstraction of visual styles that sync with all the style files in the system. This allows you to create a scalable and consistent visual system for UI development. In summary, design tokens are a powerful tool for streamlining your design and development processes. Carefully considering their implementation and adhering to best practices will help make sure that your design system is efficient, effective, and accessible to all users.

Tokens can be exported as JSON and transformed into other types of files too. Adobe’s Spectrum is one of the most comprehensive design system examples that use design tokens as visual data. While Adobe uses design tokens only for basic building blocks, its tokens can ensure consistent and cohesive product experiences across all platforms. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been making headlines lately, as they become increasingly popular in the digital space. While tokenization lies at the heart of this trend, it has also found its way into web design through the introduction of design tokens.