A dev in our Slack said my tokens were 'too rigid' and it clicked

Last Thursday our frontend guy, Marcus, left a comment on a PR saying my spacing tokens felt 'too rigid' for the new marketing pages. I was annoyed at first because I spent 3 months building that scale. But then he showed me his screen with a hero section that needed 9px gaps and I had nothing between 8 and 12. We ended up adding a few fluid options and now I'm rethinking all my fixed values. Has anyone else had to loosen up a strict system without breaking consistency?

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evan5111d ago

Same thing happened to me last year on a client project, they needed 6 and 14 and my scale just stopped. I added one fluid token for large screens and it fixed that case, but then another section wanted something in between anyway. We ended up keeping the hard scale for small stuff and switching to fluid only for the big layout gaps. Yeah, you just have to accept that marketing folks will always find a weird number.