A senior dev told me to stop over-engineering my design tokens

I was building out a design system with like 500 color tokens for every possible shade, and a senior dev pulled me aside and said 'you're making this impossible for anyone to remember.' We cut it down to 12 core tokens and now my team actually uses the system instead of just overriding everything. Has anyone else had to cut way back on token complexity after feedback?

2 comments

2 Comments

riley51710h ago

Totally been there. Had a whole system with like 30 different grays once and nobody used it. Way better to just have a handful of solid ones and some utility classes for edge cases.

seth_nguyen4h ago

Buddy of mine spent a whole weekend building out this insane color palette for his company's app, like 40 different shades of blue alone. On Monday the lead designer just looked at it and said "we're using Bootstrap now." He's still a little bitter about it when the topic comes up.