Design tokens have provided a visual foundation of many design systems since Salesforce pioneered the concept in 2014. I wrote an impassioned article

Naming Tokens in Design Systems

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-21 00:30:06

Design tokens have provided a visual foundation of many design systems since Salesforce pioneered the concept in 2014. I wrote an impassioned article on design tokens in 2016, and my energy on the topic continues to grow. As systems of visual style spread across a widening landscape of components, platforms and outputs, design tokens — and their names — are increasingly important.

Effective token names improve and sustain a team’s shared understanding of visual style through design, code, and other interdisciplinary handoffs. Terms matter. As we make things, we must be able to browse and search tools to quickly recognize and recall the purposeful decisions we’ve made. Not just in code and documentation, but in design tools too.

And naming is hard. Building token schema is a formative and occasionally passionate activity for a team. I’ve contributed to architecting tokens at Discovery Education, Morningstar, REI, USAC, NetApp, and ~10 other systems, each time unique yet informed by those that came before. Other public token collections inspire us too: Adobe, Shopify (as-is, emerging), Infor, Bloomberg, Sprout, Orbit and USDS among them.

As tokens become more sophisticated, naming patterns matter. Brandon Ferrua and Stephanie Rewis of Salesforce UX (at Clarity 2019) and Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent of Shopify UX (at Design Systems Community Chapter Toronto, September 2020) exposed their models. Adobe Spectrum and Danny Bank’s Style Dictionary token tool document their models too.