We work with many of our clients around their design token architecture for their design systems. Many times, this is the first some team members have heard about design tokens, so here’s the starter guide we send them in order to get them acclimated.

• WTF are Design Tokens, a great video overview by Jina Anne, coiner of the term “design tokens.”
• Design tokens explained and why your company should use Arcade, from former design intern Julia Fernandez. (Full disclosure: Arcade is a sibling company to SuperFriendly.) Julia shares from the point of view of a designer that just learned about design tokens for the first time.
• A guide to design tokens, from InVision.
• Design Tokens: An Intro For Designers, from Sympli.
• A bit more code-centric, Nathan Curtis’ “Tokens in Design Systems” walks through some of the decision-making process behind design tokens. Particularly useful is the framing of “options vs. decisions.”
• Adobe’s design system Spectrum has an incredibly useful structure for their design tokens. Their separation of global tokens, alias tokens, and component-specific tokens is something we use every time we create a token architecture for a organization.
• Design Tokens in Figma: How to get started, today, by Jan Six. (Jan is a collaborator on Arcade.)

We’ll continue to add to this as we find more great design token introduction resources.

Happy design tokening!