(2020) What the #&%$ are Design Tokens? 

As a professional design who has worked alongside developers for almost 10 years, this is extremely accurate based on my experience. I have had those exact encounters with the dev team.

Just helped me understand tokens in 6 minutes vs 2 weeks of reading 😅 very grateful Product Designer here 🙏🏽

WOW This is the best, and more simple explanation for design tokens I have ever seen. Thanks a lot!

Thank you! easy Comprehend with your storytelling. 😃

This is the best way I’ve heard it described- and I’ve gone through written articles, other videos , Reddit, etc. I somewhat got it but with these examples it’s thoroughly grasped. Thank you so much, so so helpful

I LOVED this video. Super helpful,succinct, and great summary on the topic. I’m officially a fan, great video!!

Thank you, that was the quick and simple explanation that I was looking for.

Summarized eveytthing sweetly, this video should be more popular4

Really helpful examples as it’s reflects what discussions happen when moving between design and development in product design. You could also setup direct CSS or SASS variables to achieve a similar outcome

Super simple explanation about design tokens, you nailed it man !!!

This is going to help my project a lot, thank you!

Really awesome explanation video, the best we have encountered, great job!

Super helpful explanations. Thank you!

Nice explanation ! Useful thanks !

This is brilliant, my current project is putting together a design system (for digital, print and front of house) for one of the biggest aps department in Australia. I've researched and learnt so much in the last few weeks about design systems. I've been looking at private companies and their design systems set up, and learning different terms like tokens, foundations etc... This video is so basic and straight to the point. Well done mate. Keep em coming. 👍

Awesome bro!!! Good job!!! 😎 Why aren't the component-specific tokens named?

WOW! Great explanation!

You make it look easy, great job 👏

By far the best explanation of design tokens i've come across. Thanks mate, i learnt something new today!

Everything make sense now. Thank you!

Thank you so much! This is what I'm looking for!!! the best!!

This is I what I'm talking about, great explanation!

well, thank you for sharing. You explained very clearly. Cheers

Easy to comprehend. Thanks for the explanation. :)

This is grate explanation. Good job!

Nicely explained, so easy to learn

man, youre god, thanks for not making a video that 1 hour long and explaining in 6 mins.

OMG THANK YOU FOR THIS!

You are amazing!!

i love the way you explain that !

👍👍👍❤️ Thank you very much for your clear explanation

what a legendary video

Thank youuuu!!!

super clear thanks

Great little story

Would you use a file JSON file of tokens for CSS as well? And the are the context specific tokens in anyway related to the global tokens? From your example they seem separate but you mentioned that they are kind of inbetween? Thanks

it was great thank you so much

TIL! :) Thank you for sharing this.

Great stuff man

Great job

Thank you :)

Nice

I actually really enjoyed this explanation to an otherwise abstract concept. It seems this is something I've just instinctually always done throughout the years, but interesting it has a name and formal explanation in the industry now. It seems this really just has design and dev teams align around using the same terms and definitions for everything; more or less having the design team/system organised like CSS classes and specificity rules that directly translate to front end equivalents. My only question is about efficiency, as those intermediate, alias tokens are difficult to anticipate early on, and do require a fair bit of work to inject later on, though of course the benefit is that once set, they shouldn't really require any further maintenance…in theory anyway. 😎 Thanks!

Thanxxxxx

where is the like button! where is the like button! cool video man.

I’m a graphic designer but I’ve never heard of these. Is it usually part of a designer’s role to make these? How do I make them? Our team doesn’t work directly with developers or engineers because it’s outsourced, but I’m curious if I’d need to know how to make them in the future. Excellent video btw!

Hey great video! I just have one question, are design tokens made into classes in css afterwards?

In my experience as a font-end developer, 'tokens' are mostly created as variables / constants by the developer, using whatever styleguide has been provided by the design team. It's often just a Figma/Sketch file with all the needed values for fonts, colours etc, and it's up to the dev team to translate these into re-usable variables in their projects. I personally haven't heard the term 'token' used for this purpose, but we've all been working in this way for a while, regardless of terminology.

this is so useful I dont knw why designs apps are not taking advantage of this

This was a huge help, but question about the part where you have content specific tokens / Alias tokens. What if Starbucks-Brand color was linked to all 3 of those alias tokens wouldn't that be the same as if you linked the global right to the buttons? I didn't fully understand how that lets you change the color of the radio button without making it complicated for development. Thanks!

How to Nest and Name tokens? Is there a place where i can see how you name tokens and nest them?

Thank you, it's a very helpful video. There is a question: what if a component has two color values? If we take this radio button, there are two colors there: blue for selection and gray for outside border. Does that mean that we must assign two global color tokens for the alias token of this component? And the secon question is how and in what app are these design tokes should be created? Can you please do more videos on tokens and maybe actually show how to make them? That would be so great

What's the difference between design tokens vs. CSS?

Aren't components in XD the same as Tokens in Figma? Please, correct me if I am wrong.

Engineer’s TLDR: a constant/parameter at project’s style

I dont understand the coding part. How does a coder add the token in the code? Would have liked to see the example in the storyline.

Can anyone please recommend a plugin for me , i am having issues with tokens for figma

Designers invented variables

Hmm.. I use "Nicknames" for elements for years but we never called them "tokens" 🤷‍♂️

How are tokens actually created?

Designers know what the HEX values are...