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Design Tokens in CSS: The 20% That Carries the Whole Design System

· 21 min read
Pere Pages
Pere Pages
Software Engineer
A tall shelving unit seen head-on. The bottom shelf holds a small number of large, labelled jars of pigment, each with one clear tag. The shelves above hold many smaller unlabelled bottles, and thin threads run from each small bottle down to one of the big labelled jars it was poured from.

I am building a design system, and the part I keep coming back to is not the components. It is the hundred or so named decisions underneath them. Design tokens are the twenty percent of a design system that decides whether the other eighty holds together, and the part of them you actually have to understand fits in one careful read.