Design tokens are now table stakes, not a nice-to-have

Naming styles as tokens (color-bg-primary, not "Blue 3") has moved from best practice to baseline expectation on teams running any kind of design system. This is established practice, not a new fad.

Token-based naming — semantic names tied to purpose, not appearance — keeps showing up as the default way design systems are structured now, because it's what actually survives rebrands and dark-mode without breaking every file. It's not new or exciting, which is exactly why it's established rather than trending: teams that skip it end up with unmaintainable style libraries within a year. For a junior designer, fluency here signals you understand systems thinking, not just making things look nice in one file.

Related in Design systems

Established

Design tokens are baseline literacy now, not a nice-to-have

Design tokens (colour, spacing, radius values defined once and reused everywhere) have moved from 'advanced design systems topic' to expected practice across teams. If you're not naming your values, you're behind the curve.

designsystems.news15 Jan

Established

Design tokens are still the backbone of Material Design

Google's Material Design continues to push token-based theming as the default way to build flexible, on-brand components — it's the clearest real-world example of tokens done at scale. For juniors, understanding tokens beats memorising any one system's components.

material.io10 Jan

Established

Material 3 Expressive: systems that flex, not just scale

Google's Material 3 Expressive update layers more personality — motion, colour, shape — onto Material's existing token structure without a rebuild. It's a solid case study in how mature design systems evolve.

design.google16 Apr