Understanding Design Tokens: The Building Blocks of Consistency

If you’ve ever wondered how apps and websites keep their look and feel consistent across teams, products, and even platforms — there’s a powerful tool at play behind the scenes: design tokens. 

Imagine you’re building a spaceship out of LEGOs. Each brick used in building that spaceship has a specific size, color and shape, and those attributes will be consistent no matter what you build. You can use the same gray 2×2 brick to make a house, a dinosaur, the Millennium Falcon or a replica of the Louvre. 

Just like the gray LEGO brick, design tokens are the foundational building blocks, based on your identity system or brand guidelines, of a design system, providing platform-agnostic variables across applications. These small but mighty reusable values include, but are not limited to:  

• Colors 

• Typography (fonts and sizes) 

• Spacing (padding, margins, and grid) 

• Sizing and border radius (how rounded a button is) 

• Shadows, motion, and more 

Tokens are ideally stored in one central place (likely Figma), and they drive the appearance of everything — from the buttons on your website to the headings in your customer portal. The tokens directly correlate with our CSS classes, so it’s important to keep your Figma file up-to-date. 

Why design tokens matter

You don’t have to be a designer or developer to see the benefits of design tokens. Implementing this base layer of information into your design system has lasting impacts throughout a project lifecycle. The most influential benefits include: 

Consistency at scale

When used properly, design tokens ensure that all your digital properties share a common and recognizable look and feel. When elements are familiar to your users, there’s less tension throughout the digital experience. A button on your website will look the same as buttons on your app, portal and internal sites.  

Faster, smarter changes

The benefit of having your tokens in one place is that you only have to make a change one time. Want to update your brand’s primary color? Or increase font sizes for better readability? With design tokens, you update the value once, and it flows everywhere automatically. 

Seamless collaboration

Design tokens create a shared language between designers and developers, removing opportunities for miscommunication in handoff. This ensures that the design vision is accurately captured in the final product.  

Flexibility and support

Need to absorb a partner brand or develop support for visually impaired users? Design tokens make it easy to incorporate things like dark mode, accessibility improvements and optimization, or branded experiences for different clients, without redesigning everything from scratch. 

Types of design tokens

The list of tokens looks very similar in most design systems because only the core attributes of a system can be tokenized. These are the primary attributes that must stay consistent throughout all of your products and platforms. The following tables break down the most common tokens and what they typically define:

Best practices for using design tokens

1. Start with strategy

Define what tokens you’ll need (colors, typography, spacing, etc.) and decide how you’ll structure them. To build that structure, tokens can be divided into two categories: base tokens, which are typically neutral and not tied to any specific context and semantic tokens, which apply meaning to the base tokens by defining how they are used in specific elements in the design system. 

2. Use semantic naming, not literal

Clear and consistent naming conventions are key, but you can go a level deeper by sticking to names based on meaning rather than appearance. Avoid names like “blue-500” and instead use names like “color-primary” or “color-background-hover.” This will make it easier to change styles later without breaking design intent.

3. Document token usage clearly

Documentation is key to successfully integrating design tokens into your design system. In your documentation, include what each token is for, where to use it, and usage examples. This guidance helps everyone on the team (not just designers) apply tokens correctly. 

4. Review and evolve tokens over time

Tokens are not meant to be static elements; they will evolve over time with your brand and design needs. It’s best to treat tokens like code by versioning, reviewing, and depreciating unused ones. Regular audits ensure that design tokens remain relevant and accurate, helping to maintain consistency across your digital ecosystem. 

5. Integrate tokens into design and code workflows

One of the primary goals of using design tokens is to streamline the design-to-code process. It’s best to sync tokens between design tools and development environments to make the handoff as easy as possible. Store tokens in a platform-agnostic format (like JSON or YAML) and let tools or code transform them for web, iOS, Android, etc. Lastly, utilize tools that can automate updates, like Tokens Studio or Style Dictionary.  

Final thoughts

Design tokens might seem like a behind-the-scenes detail, but they have a massive impact on how smoothly your team works and how polished your product feels to users. 

They’re the glue that holds your design system together, and they empower teams to move faster, with more confidence and less rework. 

If you’re ready to take your design system to the next level, our Main Digital experts can help. We’ll work with your team to create scalable, token-driven systems that keep your product consistent, flexible, and future‑ready. Contact us to start building a smarter foundation.