Tokenisation in Design: The Key to Scaling Businesses and Streamlining Collaboration
Oct 6, 2024
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, maintaining consistency across various platforms and products is crucial to a business’s success. As products scale, ensuring that every touchpoint—from mobile apps to websites—maintains brand consistency can be a daunting task. This is where tokenisation comes into play, and as a designer, you are in the perfect position to lead this transformation within your organisation.
In this article, we'll explore what tokenisation is, why it is essential for scaling businesses, and how designers can take the lead in introducing and implementing it. We'll also dive into how development teams use tokenisation to streamline workflows and reduce technical debt, ensuring a smooth transition from design to code.
What Is Tokenisation?
At its core, design tokenisation is the process of abstracting design properties—such as colours, typography, spacing, and shadows—into reusable variables. These tokens store the design decisions in a way that can be used both in design tools like Figma and in codebases across various platforms, including web, mobile apps, and even marketing collateral.
Tokens ensure that a single source of truth exists for every visual element in the design system. Instead of defining a colour as #FF5733 in multiple places, you define it as a token—like:
—that can be used consistently throughout the design system and in the development process.
Breaking It Down: What Exactly Are Tokens?
Think of tokens as the DNA of your design system. They are small, reusable elements that represent:
Colours: Instead of hard-coding a hex value for every button, header, and link, you create a token like
that defines this once and reuses it everywhere.
Typography: Define tokens for font sizes, weights, and line heights, e.g:
Spacing: Use tokens to represent spacing values such as padding and margins:
Shadows and Borders: You can even create tokens for UI effects like shadows and border radii.
By creating these tokens, your design system becomes scalable and flexible, allowing for easy updates across multiple platforms.
The Importance of Tokenisation for Scaling Businesses
As your business grows, so too do its design needs. Tokenisation is critical for scaling because it allows for:
Consistency: With tokens, you ensure that your design looks consistent across various platforms and products. No more worrying about slight variations in colours or typography between your web app and mobile app.
Efficiency: Updating a design element becomes significantly easier. If your primary brand colour changes, you simply update the
token, and the change cascades across every instance of that colour in your product suite.
Collaboration: Tokenisation bridges the gap between design and development teams, making the handoff smoother. By aligning on tokens, designers and developers speak the same language, reducing confusion and errors during implementation.
Technical Debt Reduction: As businesses scale, outdated design elements can become a burden on the development team. Tokenisation prevents this by allowing for easy updates without touching multiple lines of code, thus reducing technical debt over time.
How Designers Can Evangelise Tokenisation
As a designer, you have the unique opportunity to plant the seed of tokenisation within your organisation. Here’s how you can take the lead:
1. Start with Figma: The Source of Truth
Figma is a great tool to kickstart tokenisation. Begin by setting up a well-organised design system within Figma, where you create consistent styles for colours, typography, and spacing. These styles will act as the foundation for your design tokens.
In Figma:
Define text styles (e.g., body text, headers) and colour styles (e.g., primary, secondary) that align with your brand guidelines.
Use components and variants to ensure reusability and consistency across your designs.
Once you have a structured design system in place, introduce the idea of tokens to your team. Explain how each colour, type style, and spacing rule is a token that can be referenced in both design and code. Figma Tokens is a plugin that makes it easy to export these design elements into token formats like JSON, which developers can use.
2. Align with Development Teams Early
One of the biggest benefits of tokenisation is that it aligns design and development. Developers use tokens to keep their code modular and maintainable, just as you use them to maintain consistency in your design system.
Speak their language: When discussing tokenisation with developers, frame it in terms of efficiency. Explain how tokens allow developers to update design elements in one place, reducing the need to search for specific hex codes or values throughout the codebase.
Collaborate on tools: Developers often use tools like Storybook or Design Systems Manager (DSM) to manage design tokens within the codebase. As a designer, familiarise yourself with these tools so you can collaborate effectively with the development team.
Establish a design-to-code workflow: Once you’ve created tokens in Figma, work with your developers to ensure these tokens are exported into a format they can use in their codebase (e.g., JSON, CSS variables).
3. Demonstrate the ROI of Tokenisation
To successfully introduce tokenisation within your organisation, it’s essential to demonstrate its return on investment (ROI). Highlight the benefits:
Time Savings: Show how tokenisation reduces the time spent on manual updates and reworks across platforms.
Consistency Across Products: Walk your team through how tokenisation ensures a cohesive brand experience across web, mobile, and marketing.
Future-Proofing the Design System: Emphasise how tokenisation makes it easier to scale the design system as your product suite grows.
Consider creating a small pilot project to demonstrate the power of tokenisation. For example, you could update a specific component (like buttons) across your design system using tokens and show how the update flows through to the development team.
How Development Teams Utilise Tokenisation
From a developer’s perspective, tokens provide a clean, scalable, and maintainable approach to implementing design. Here’s how development teams typically use tokenisation:
1. Integration into the Codebase
Design tokens are usually exported from design tools (like Figma) into code formats like JSON, CSS variables, or SCSS. These tokens are then integrated into the codebase, where they act as variables for UI elements.
For example:
When developers need to update the primary colour, they simply update the
variable, and it automatically updates everywhere it is referenced in the code.
2. Component-Based Development
In frameworks like React or Vue, components are built using these design tokens. Developers can reference tokens in the code, ensuring that every instance of a component adheres to the design system’s rules. For example, a button component might look like this:
3. Maintaining Consistency Across Platforms
By utilising tokenisation, development teams ensure that the same design elements are used consistently across web, iOS, and Android. Tools like Style Dictionary or thema allow teams to automatically transform tokens into platform-specific formats.
Conclusion: Why Tokenisation Is the Future of Scalable Design
Tokenisation is more than just a design system trend; it’s a necessity for businesses looking to scale their digital products efficiently. As a designer, you have the power to lead this change by introducing tokens into your design process and collaborating closely with development teams. The result is not only consistency and brand integrity but also a more efficient, streamlined workflow that reduces technical debt and future-proofs your design system.
Next Steps: How to Start Tokenising Today
Audit your current design system in Figma.
Create reusable styles and components that can serve as tokens.
Collaborate with your development team to establish a design-to-code pipeline using these tokens.
Evangelise the benefits of tokenisation across your organisation, showing the ROI in terms of consistency, scalability, and efficiency.
By taking these steps, you’ll not only improve your product’s design consistency but also demonstrate your leadership and foresight in building scalable systems that drive business success.
