Thursday, May 2, 2024

Creating & crafting a design token system by Eric Singhartinger

design tokenization

Creating an efficient token system and organizing our design system was a mammoth of a task. However, we quickly realized that this process extended beyond just setting up the system; it required educating our designers and developers on how to make the most of these tokens. To achieve success, we needed a delicate balance of logic, experience, and expertise, coupled with user-centered practices like interviews, usability testing, and collaborative workshops involving various teams.

Why use tokens?

I wouldn’t suggest a copy/paste since the values might be way too specific to the project. Imagine walking into an art gallery and stumbling upon a piece that catches your eye—not because of its traditional strokes or sculpted forms, but due to its vivid manipulation of digital elements. This is digital art.  Now, consider receiving a beautifully designed flier for an upcoming event; it communicates effectively, its purpose clear and aesthetics... Design tokens, like any other aspect of design, should be accessible to all users. Testing tokens for accessibility and conducting regular audits of your design system can help ensure that it meets the latest standards.

Layers of Design Tokens

Brand colors should be meaningful, and neutral and secondary colors are there to make connections. Every tone value between 0 and 100 expresses the amount of light present in color. The 100 tone is always 100% white, the lightest tone in the range; the 0 tone is 100% black, the darkest tone in the range. Instead of using hard-coded values (such as hex values for color or pixel values for spacing), you give values names.

Crafting Components

Now you have some good fundamental knowledge of how to set up your “Design Token System”. 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.

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Although tokens have only been in existence for a short time, they have quickly gained an important role in design systems. Tech leaders have increasingly embraced tokens in their performances, recognizing them as powerful tools that facilitate both the design and development processes. Tokens are considered universal and multipurpose because they enhance design-design and design-development communications, thereby taking them to a more prolific level. All values are managed from one place and distributed to different environments at once.

In this interregnum founders and developers are trying their best to break frontiers in spite of regulatory uncertainties. The best token system will not last too long if it is considered illegal by regulators in the relevant jurisdictions. A look at the composition of team members of most blockchain/Web3/token startups reflects this techno-centricity quite well. Engineering, however, is the practice of creating a technology that ultimately always has a social goal. Looking at engineering through a purely technological lens perpetuates a reductionist view of why and how we build technology.

design tokenization

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Having lawyers, economists, and social scientists as part of the team in addition to the technical engineers, on executive level and below, will be paramount to developing resilient token systems. However, interdisciplinary work takes time and effort, since all four categories overlap, and the communication between the different disciplines requires some ramp-up efforts. One of the biggest challenges — which might seem mundane at first — stems from the fact that the vocabulary used by different disciplines often differs when describing the same phenomena. The same word, in different disciplines, can often mean a very different thing, and lead to serious misunderstandings.

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They should also be useful for everything that gives your Design System personality and character — something I like to call The Anatomy of a Design System. It is my personal preference.It’s similar to an approach outlined by Daniel Banks, one of the maintainers of Style-Dictionary, he talks about it in a blogpost. Then when running something like style-dictionary, you could run two instances, one for each theme. Let’s imagine for a minute that we have a tokenized input component. Below are some examples that are either unspecified or still lack best practices.

So what are design tokens then?

The advantage is that you treat all of the 4 themes equally and wireframing and developing new features and flows with those components will have a better focus on UX, rather than distract with its UI. All of those base components can either be done in a main theme or in a neutral style. Most of the time, depending on the type of project, I use either 4X or 8X for my scaling system.

I will describe how to connect other departments in one of the following blog posts. The disadvantage of a neutral theme is that you produce overhead, so in total 5 themes. From that, anything referencing a Dimension will be a System Token, since they alias a Primitive Token (or since they don’t reference a RAW value, see it as it best serves you). Since I often need 1px for border width, I will add a dimension of 1px. Imagine you are painting your huge house with your partner and kids.

These small design units are revolutionizing how designers create and maintain visual brand consistency across the various digital products and cooperate with front-end dev teams, automating the process and improving communication. Design Tokens are a set of variables that define the visual language of a design system. They work as the connective tissue for maintaining consistent and cohesive designs across digital products. Design Tokens govern critical aspects of UI design such as colour, typography, spacing and effects.

In the current highly competitive market, businesses strive to employ as many digital channels as possible to promote their products. While this may seem like a rational approach, it can lead to inconsistencies and confusion for customers when a business operates several web platforms. Fortunately, the advent of design systems has made this issue less challenging for both parties. Our aim was to assess the ease of locating variables, ensure that designers were employing tokens for their intended purposes, and identify any pain points or challenges that arose in the process.

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