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The ultimate Design Token setup

Or how to manage design tokens across your company

Lukas Oppermann
UX Collective
21 min readSep 25, 2024

Before we dive into this, let me tell you that there is no one right or perfect way to do design tokens. If what you are doing works for you — great. No need to change it. However, I do feel that one can learn from others and there are always things to improve.

Goal

Every action has a cost. So, we need to think about the goals for our design token system. Which aspects do we want to optimize for? And what is not so important for us.

Resilience

Design tokens are a core part of your design system and product building toolkit. Because of this a simple mistake can bring down your entire product suit or at least break the products. This is why it is so important to make your tokens as resilient as possible. This can be by using versioning or implementing rigorous testing.

Future proof

The tooling landscape changes constantly. A few years ago, most of us were still using Sketch. You cannot see into the future, but you can try to rely as little on specific tools as possible. This way, you will have a much easier time adjusting, if a tool in your tool chain gets replaced.

Flexibility

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Lukas Oppermann

Product designer with a love for complex problems & data. I post about Figma, design tokens, design systems & design related topics. https://lukasoppermann.com

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