How Design Tokens improve the scalability of your Design System

Today, consistency and efficiency have become crucial for creating memorable and functional user experiences. Design tokens have emerged as a powerful solution for companies looking to standardize and scale their products across various platforms and contexts. These small pieces of abstract data are much more than simple variables. To understand their roles and benefits, we spoke with Paweł Walczak, a senior developer at Eneon. He provided insights into their functionality and impact on the development of different products within digital ecosystems.

A brief definition to start. A design token is a value that symbolizes a specific aspect of design, such as a color, typography, margin, or even an animation style. These tokens play a crucial role in harmonizing user interfaces by allowing the reuse of these values across various components of a design system. Moreover, they enhance collaboration between designers and developers by providing a common language to articulate design choices.

“These tokens can be defined in a file, often in JSON format, and serve as a single source of truth for both designers and developers,” explains Paweł. “Take a very simple example. If a company’s logo color is red, then ‘red’ becomes a primary color token in the Design System.” This approach ensures that the correct shade of red is consistently applied across all platforms in the ecosystem.

Scalability through Design Tokens

Design tokens are inherently designed to enhance the scalability of your design system. “By organizing tokens into sets and groups, we can easily adapt and extend our design systems to new brands or sub-brands.”
Here’s a brief overview.

Facilitation:

Modern companies often manage multiple brands or need to adapt their branding according to regions. Design tokens allow easy changes to themes or styles across design systems without rewriting code. For example, by simply adjusting the values of the tokens, a brand can switch from its main theme to a secondary theme for a specific campaign, ensuring that these adjustments are uniformly deployed across all applications and products.

Adaptability:

Design tokens allow for smooth adaptation to different screen sizes and resolutions. By defining tokens for font sizes, spacings, or even interactive styles suited to mobile devices, tablets, or desktops, companies can ensure an optimized user experience on any platform without repetitive manual interventions. “Since design decisions are stored and managed through tokens, their application across platforms ensures that all elements accurately reflect the brand. Whether it’s a website, a mobile app, or any other digital interface, the appearance will be uniform,” explains Paweł, which naturally improves the overall consistency of the ecosystem.

Automation and Cross-Platform Integration:

Thanks to tools like Style Dictionary, design tokens can be automatically transformed into specific formats needed for different technologies—CSS, iOS, Android, etc. This automated transformation reduces the risk of human errors and accelerates product development, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than managing consistency. “StyleDictionary is a Node library that can also be used as a standalone CLI tool. Originally developed by Amazon, it is used to generate code for multiple platforms and frameworks from JSONs containing Design Tokens. What’s great about this library is that it’s highly configurable and supports multiple scenarios right out of the box.”

When to use Design Tokens?

Implementing an effective design system requires careful planning, close collaboration between teams, and a long-term commitment to its maintenance and evolution. It is therefore important to determine if it is the right solution for your business.

Design tokens will undoubtedly be useful in the following situations:

• You are planning to update the design of your product or to create a new product.
• Your design system is applied across multiple products or platforms.
• You want to maintain or easily update styles in the future.
• You aim to master variations of themes that share common references.

Design tokens are not just a tool for maintaining consistency, but a strategic lever for scalability and adaptability for businesses in the current digital landscape. By integrating design tokens into your design system, your company can not only improve its operational efficiency but also increase its capacity to innovate and respond quickly to market opportunities.

Interested in integrating Design Tokens into your design system? Contact us to explore how we can elevate your projects to the next level! ✌️