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“Design token” is an accepted and widely used term (see Amazon’s Style Dictionary, Adobe’s Spectrum, etc.) that might even be standardized[0] by W3C at some poi

“Design token” is an accepted and widely used term (see Amazon’s Style Dictionary, Adobe’s Spectrum, etc.) that might even be standardized[0] by W3C at some point soon. Unlike “design element”, it refers to a more general concept; there is less confusion when you refer to a color, or to a measure, as “token” rather than “element”. (The term “variable” may be more fitting, but it is on the other hand too generic and conflicting with a different idea in implementation domain: CSS or JS variables can mean the same thing, but not always.) [0] https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group

MrMcCall 2y ago
Thanks. That makes sense, even if my old-school brain finds the term less than optimal.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  As an old-school designer, I didn’t like the term at first, but to be honest it is winning me. I was taught design in terms of design models and design systems, so there was not much of a leap to “design token” as referring to a building block. I am not 100% sure how I feel about it in general. If I was a designer who was only given freedom to operate within a set of tokens, I would certainly feel like my hands are tied. At the same time, I can see how even while using tokens it is entirely possible to design a bad interface. However, I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    > I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs Absolutely. It's like the proper legacy of the GoF's "Design Patterns" book, whose lack of importance and acceptance has bewildered me for close on 30yrs now. Of course, it also means I have rich fields to till for my own work, so bwahaha :-) [Note that the actual design patterns described in their book are not the important part; their understanding that we must implement software using patterns is their most important concept.]
  - arkh 2y ago
    You can already imagine OS vendors publishing their design tokens to let you "easily" integrate your applications even if not using their UI libraries.

MrMcCall 2y ago

Thanks. That makes sense, even if my old-school brain finds the term less than optimal.

strogonoff 2y ago
As an old-school designer, I didn’t like the term at first, but to be honest it is winning me. I was taught design in terms of design models and design systems, so there was not much of a leap to “design token” as referring to a building block. I am not 100% sure how I feel about it in general. If I was a designer who was only given freedom to operate within a set of tokens, I would certainly feel like my hands are tied. At the same time, I can see how even while using tokens it is entirely possible to design a bad interface. However, I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  > I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs Absolutely. It's like the proper legacy of the GoF's "Design Patterns" book, whose lack of importance and acceptance has bewildered me for close on 30yrs now. Of course, it also means I have rich fields to till for my own work, so bwahaha :-) [Note that the actual design patterns described in their book are not the important part; their understanding that we must implement software using patterns is their most important concept.]
- arkh 2y ago
  You can already imagine OS vendors publishing their design tokens to let you "easily" integrate your applications even if not using their UI libraries.