Integrating Design Tokens Into Your Design System Workflow
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Design systems are essential to building consistent, scalable user experiences. But without design tokens, your system may be missing its most efficient link between design and development. Design tokens are the structured, symbolic representation of design decisions, such as color, typography, spacing, and more. When integrated into your design system workflow, they ensure consistency, accelerate theming, and reduce time spent managing styles.
In this post, we explore how to integrate design tokens into your design system workflow, from naming conventions and Figma usage to development handoff, governance, and cross-platform implementation. Whether you’re starting from scratch or evolving a mature system, this guide will help you build a scalable pipeline using tools like Tokens Studio, Figma variables, and Style Dictionary.
Why Design Tokens Matter in a Scalable Workflow
Design tokens convert visual styles into structured, reusable values that both designers and developers can understand. Instead of hard-coding hex values or manually changing styles across components, tokens let you define core properties once and update them everywhere.
Tokens promote:
- Visual consistency across teams, brands, and platforms
- Streamlined design-to-development handoffs
- Theming and white-labeling flexibility
- Easier updates and maintenance
A design token workflow unlocks these benefits through tooling, governance, and cross-functional collaboration.
Laying the Foundation: Token Naming Conventions
Before implementation, you need a stable naming structure. Naming tokens clearly ensures they are understandable, searchable, and scalable.
Key Principles:
Use a structure like [category]-[property]-[modifier], for example:
color-background-primary font-size-heading-lg spacing-padding-md
Start with semantic tokens like color-error or border-focus and alias them to core tokens like color-red-600. This abstraction enables flexibility when styles evolve. Avoid ambiguous names like blue-1, and plan for extensibility. Ensure your naming system accounts for future themes, states, and component specificity without requiring major rewrites.
See how we standardize scalable design decisions in enterprise UX audits.
Building Tokens in Figma and Tokens Studio
Figma is a design platform that supports variables and styles, but it becomes significantly more powerful when paired with the Tokens Studio plugin. Together, they allow for advanced token management, theming, and integration with development.
Workflow Overview:
- Define variables and styles in Figma for color, text, and effects.
- Use Tokens Studio to organize tokens into sets, themes, and modes.
- Apply tokens to components via Tokens Studio or Figma variables.
- Export tokens as JSON for developers or use Style Dictionary for transformation.
Tokens Studio also supports hierarchical separation of tokens into core (reference), semantic (purpose-driven), and component (applied) levels. This keeps your system clean while supporting complexity.
Learn more about design token creation here.
Applying Tokens to Components
Once defined, tokens need to be applied consistently to design components.
Figma offers four ways to do this:
- Tokens Studio themes (recommended for stability)
- Figma variables (recommended for downstream design flexibility)
- Figma styles
- Styles with variable references
Tokens applied via Tokens Studio maintain a connection even if styles or variables are stripped in Figma. This makes them ideal for design systems where version control and system integrity are critical. Meanwhile, variables give designers more flexibility and direct control.
Use variants to represent states like hover, active, or disabled. Link each variant to its corresponding token, so state changes are reflected automatically across all instances.
Development Handoff and Token Transformation
Design tokens are only useful if developers can access and apply them easily. That requires transforming design token JSON into code formats like CSS, SCSS, XML, or Swift.
Use Style Dictionary, a framework that allows you to:
- Transform tokens to different output formats
- Structure output by platform or brand
- Version tokens with GitHub
You can use Tokens Studio to export token JSON and pair it with Style Dictionary for transformation. For visual users, the Style Dictionary Configurator provides a web interface.
Example Style Dictionary config:
{ "source": ["tokens/*.json"], "platforms": { "web": { "transformGroup": "web", "buildPath": "build/web/", "files": [{ "destination": "variables.css", "format": "css/variables" }] } } }
Explore how we integrate design systems directly into frontend engineering.
Governance: Sustaining a Design Token System
As your design system scales, so should your governance practices. Token bloat and inconsistency can set in without clear roles and maintenance workflows. As expert designers know, governance should be an integral part of your design thinking from the start.
Recommended Roles:
- Design System Lead: Owns naming, conventions, and approval process
- Token Guardian: Maintains source of truth across brands and themes
- UX Designers and Developers: Apply tokens, request updates, and give feedback
Establish workflows for proposing, reviewing, and deprecating tokens. Use GitHub or Jira to track change requests and publish a changelog for each release.
Scaling Your System With Themes and Modes
Figma and Tokens Studio make theming easy. Tokens Studio lets you define multiple themes (e.g., light, dark, brand A, brand B), while modes control dynamic elements like hover states or content styles.
You can use themes in the following steps:
- Create core tokens once
- Apply them in different themes
- Switch modes with a dropdown
- Export per-theme styles to your codebase
This setup is especially powerful for white-label platforms or enterprise tools supporting multiple brands.
Final Thoughts: A Connected Pipeline
Integrating design tokens into your design workflow isn’t just a tooling upgrade. It’s a process change that fosters consistency, improves team velocity, and strengthens your design system.
At DOOR3, we build tokenized design systems and pipelines that empower design and engineering teams to move faster, with fewer errors. By starting with good naming, strong governance, and thoughtful tooling, you can create a resilient, future-proof design system.
Learn more about our approach to UX design systems.
Stay tuned for future parts of our series, where we’ll cover how to use GitHub to version, sync, and manage tokens collaboratively across teams. Visit our workshop page to see upcoming events and more resources.
