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Glossary ​

Defined terms and vocabulary for a streamlined communication amongst all actors within a design system.

Design Token

"The single source of truth to name and store a design decision, distributed so teams can use it across design tools and coding languages." (Design Tokens Community Group)

"Design Tokens are a methodology. IMHO, saying "design tokens are just variables" is like saying "responsive design is just media queries". It's a technology-agnostic architecture and process for scaling design across multiple platforms and devices, including native, and more." (Jina Anne)

"Design Tokens, Decisions Propagated Through a System" (Nathan Curtis)

The last one speaks about propagation, which is an important aspect of design tokens.

(Design Token) Feature

Features provide a customization option for the user experience.

Features encode user preferences (e.g. color scheme or color contrast). Design tokens may or may not support a feature.

Theme

Themes contain a set of design tokens to express a brand, support features and are exchangeable within a product on a given contract.

A theme defines which features to support and delegates implementation of these to its tokens.

Design System

The natural habitat of design tokens and themes. It's the design system responsibility to manage exchange and appliances of themes and features.

Strategic and solution design of the design system models themes and design tokens incorporating the communication between them and other actors within the design system.

(Design) Token Designers

A token designer develops designs tokens. The token design includes references, possible transforms, ambients and computed tokens (this can be done by designers and/or developers !).

(Design) Token Consumer

A user applying a token - most likely designers and engineers, but also includes branding and marketeers or generally speaking people applying the brand by using design tokens.

Tooling Authors

Folks to support design tokens in their tools and define the processes we use for crafting.

(End)Users/Customers

People like you and me visiting apps and sites and experience products applying design tokens for their theme.

Product

The application, website or service an enduser is using. A product uses a design system.

References ​