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Design Tokens: The Secret to Scaling Design

By Jessica Chang

After years of maintaining design systems at scale, I've found one approach that consistently improves team efficiency: design tokens. These small, atomic design decisions stored as variables transform how organizations manage visual consistency across platforms.

At their simplest, tokens are named entities that store design values - colors, spacing, typography, animation parameters, and more. Instead of hardcoding #FF0000 across your codebase, you reference $color-error. When that color needs to change, you update it in one place.

But tokens become truly powerful when used as part of a structured system. By creating hierarchies of tokens (primary-color → brand-blue → blue-500), you can update an entire color palette by changing just a few base values.

For multi-platform products, tokens serve as a single source of truth that can be transformed into platform-specific variables - Swift values for iOS, XML for Android, CSS variables for web. This ensures consistency while respecting platform idioms.

Using tokens requires shifting how designers work. Rather than thinking in absolute values, designers must think in systems and relationships. A button isn't 16px of padding, it's $spacing-medium.

The payoff is immense: faster design updates, more consistent interfaces, and better collaboration between design and development. When a rebrand that once took months can be implemented in days by updating base tokens, the investment clearly pays off.

Start small: identify core colors, spacing, and typography values. Create simple token names that designers and developers both understand. As your system matures, expand to more complex tokens for component-specific properties and even animation parameters.

The most sophisticated systems now use tokens not just for static properties but for entire themes, dark mode variations, and accessibility adjustments.