Itqualityassurance
- What are design tokens in a design system?
- How do developers use design tokens?
- Are design tokens necessary?
What are design tokens in a design system?
Design tokens are all the values needed to construct and maintain a design system — spacing, color, typography, object styles, animation, etc. — represented as data. These can represent anything defined by design: a color as a RGB value, an opacity as a number, an animation ease as Bezier coordinates.
How do developers use design tokens?
Design tokens give products and design systems flexibility to make changes and scale. If teams need to add platform-specific properties, they simply update the design token. For example, Android uses octal color codes instead of HEX or RGB.
Are design tokens necessary?
Benefits of using design tokens
Design tokens benefit the entire organisation: They enable products to scale by decoupling design decisions from platforms & languages. By centralising design decisions in one place they make products more consistent & maintainable.
