Design tokens: authoring vs consuming | by Nate Baldwin | Nov, 2024 | Medium

Design tokens are key to many technical successes I’ve seen in design systems. They are integral to ensuring a direct line between design and code. But, despite their successes, design tokens can fail a design system and its users in many ways. The most common challenge with design tokens is naming them. A quick search online and you will find resource upon resource to help guide you on this process. Some resources are pragmatic, some dogmatic. The consensus is that naming things is hard, and it should be relative to your own system and products. As soon as you create a new token, the name is now part of your system’s API. Changing a token name will be a breaking change to the system, and negatively impact your consumers and products. The most common solution to this problem is to never change token names. If the API never changes, there will rarely be any breaking change. It’s easy to think that this approach will ensure you maintain velocity without affecting consumers with each upda

Design tokens are key to many technical successes I’ve seen in design systems. They are integral to ensuring a direct line between design and code. But, despite their successes, design tokens can fail a design system and its users in many ways. The most common challenge with design tokens is naming them. A quick search online and you will find resource upon resource to help guide you on this process. Some resources are pragmatic, some dogmatic. The consensus is that naming things is hard, and it should be relative to your own system and products. As soon as you create a new token, the name is