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Design token sprawl is killing our projects and no one's fixing it
In my experience, when design tokens aren't managed well, they spread everywhere. We ended up with hundreds of tokens that no one could keep track of. For example, our button component had five different color tokens for the same state. This made updates a nightmare because changing one thing broke others. Your mileage may vary, but I think we need better tools for this. Take this with a grain of salt, but without strict rules, design systems fall apart.
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masons276mo ago
We had a similar mess with animation tokens last year. The motion team defined "ease-bounce" but then the mobile team made "transition-bounce" for the same curve. Took us three sprints to realize why some app felt janky while others were smooth. Now we have a spreadsheet just to track which tokens are actually the same thing. Sometimes fixing one part of the system just breaks a different part you forgot about.
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felix8816mo ago
Look at token sprawl from another angle. In my experience, having many tokens lets teams tweak designs without touching code. For example, those five color tokens for a button might handle different themes or brands. Your mileage may vary, but this flexibility can speed up work, not slow it down. Take this with a grain of salt, but sometimes more tokens mean more options, which is good. Breaking changes might come from poor docs, not the tokens themselves.
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felix_murphy76mo ago
Yeah that "tweak designs without touching code" part is exactly it. We had a similar thing where adding more spacing tokens let our team adjust layouts crazy fast for different devices. The flexibility is totally worth it when everyone knows how to use them.
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