If you are designing your product, then you should know what design tokens are. If you don’t, then you have found the article that you need. This article will tell you everything you need to know about design tokens and how they can help you improve your product’s design.
What Are Design Tokens?
Design tokens let you identify the different elements in a design system (more info). They are an effective tool to collaborate on design as they act as a design language that can be used anywhere and not just on one product. This makes them so valuable for innovation; they help speed up the design process and keep everything consistent across all parts of a design.
Why Are Design Tokens Important?
Design tokens make sure that all design elements used are the same across the entire product or multiple products. Using design tokens, a specific button will look the same every time it is used in any product without requiring you to change it to make it look the same manually. This saves time and effort that can then be used for more critical work.
They help create universal design elements that can then be adjusted at any time and will change in every instance they are used in. This helps to make changes to designs faster and makes sure that the design remains consistent.
Design tokens are essential because they help keep designs consistent and let designers make changes, no matter how large the design and product have become, making them scalable and the other uses they provide.
Here are more reasons why design tokens should be used in your design process if you don’t already use them:
- Control and manage all critical design elements
- Manage the overall look of a product and help it remain consistent with your brand
- Streamlines the design process of products
- Help make team collaboration simpler and reduce the number of misunderstandings
- It makes communication easier between designers and developers
- Add scalability to your design process
How Are Design Tokens Used?
The use of design tokens makes it easier for designers, developers, and others involved to communicate with each other about the design of a product and understand without being confused by the intricate details in the design. Names are used to describe the different attributes being used so that anyone can understand the purpose of the other elements.
Design tokens can be used for various design elements such as animations, spacing between elements, transitions, fonts, family/weight/size, color, media queries, and more. Creating universal design elements will speed up the design process and ensure that the design is consistent and scalable.
Types Of Design Tokens
Three types of design tokens can be used when designing a product. Each token is used differently to accomplish a goal that UX design companies have.
- Global Tokens
Global tokens are primitive values in the design language that are described by names to make the deal easier to understand. Global tokens can include colors, animations, transitions, typography, space, and more. The global tokens that have been created can be used and inherited by every other token that has been created.
- Alias Token
These tokens have a specific context from them to be used in. They communicate the token’s purpose and can be used when you want to use a single design element in multiple instances throughout the product.
- Component-Specific Tokens
These tokens usually inherit their value from alias tokens, but they are more specific, and their names mirror this. This design token has a particular purpose, and it is only used for that and nothing else. For example, it will influence the font family for a text that is used in a button.
Why You Should Use Design Tokens
After reading that, you should know why designers use design tokens to make the design process easier and faster.
Before deciding to use design tokens in your design process, you need to know what to do to integrate design tokens into your standing design process correctly. If you don’t see how you can begin making this change, then look for an interactive design agency to help you make the transition as smooth as it can be.
If the design process you use makes it difficult to maintain designs and scalability is an issue, you need to use design tokens. This will save time and effort that you can use to improve your product to help it succeed.
Great branding will help products succeed, and to have great branding, you need consistency, and design tokens can help with that. There will be no more need to toiling away to make sure small details are the same across the product; design tokens will quickly make sure everything is consistent. There will be no more need to manually update all instances of values when you want to change the design of an element. Now you can make it happen by changing just one design token.
Conclusion
After reading that, you should know how vital and valuable design tokens are in the design process. User experience design firms use these tokens to streamline their design process and deliver work to their customers quickly while making sure it looks precisely like what the customer wanted. If the customer wants changes made, this can be done instantly by changing a couple of design tokens.
User experience design firms are using design tokens to help them create designs that are consistent and scalable. If this is what you want, then you need to use design tokens.