I finally saw the real cost of ignoring our design system tokens

After our last audit, I found out we had 47 different shades of blue across 12 components because nobody enforced the color palette, and that stat came straight from our Figma plugin report last Wednesday.

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan_thomas1d ago

47 blues is honestly rookie numbers compared to what we found when we ran our palette audit in November. We had 89 distinct gray values spread across 23 components and nobody could agree on what "dark gray" even meant. The worst part was that the design system docs said the palette had 12 grays, but the actual Framer components were pulling values from hex codes that designers had just typed in manually over Slack messages. I think the real issue is that tokens become invisible to people after a few months and everyone starts treating them like suggestions instead of rules. That audit report data can be really harsh but its the only thing that actually forces people to clean up their mess.

lucas9721d ago

Man, 89 grays... did anyone actually admit to typing those hex codes in Slack?