Design tokens in practice: one palette, every surface

Ask five designers to style a button and you'll get five reasonable answers. Ask them six months apart and you'll get ten. Design tokens exist to collapse that variance: one named decision, made once, referenced everywhere.

Fewer tokens, used more places

The temptation is to model everything — forty shades of gray, eleven elevation levels. In practice we've found a tight set wins: a background, an ink color, one primary action color, muted text, a border, one accent. Six colors carry an entire editorial theme.

The same discipline applies to radii and shadows. Two corner radii and one card shadow cover ninety percent of real UI. When everything shares a small vocabulary, a page assembled from six different blocks still looks like one design.

Tokens are a contract, not a palette

The real value shows up at change time. When the brand team wanted a warmer primary color last quarter, it was a single edit to one token — and every button, badge and link on every site updated together. That's the moment a token stops being a variable and becomes a decision.