Can we talk about how our color tokens turned into a mess after v2.3?

Last month our team pushed a design system update and suddenly all the secondary buttons went from blue to green. Turned out someone renamed a token in Figma but forgot to update the CSS variable mapping. We had to roll back and spend a whole Thursday fixing 47 components by hand. Anybody else deal with token names that drift between design and code?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai7795d ago

Turned out someone renamed a token in Figma but forgot to update the CSS" - that's the real problem right there. Nobody talks about it but whoever built your token naming system probably didn't think about how designers and devs actually use different naming patterns. Designers like human readable names like "brand-blue" while devs want something like "color-primary-500" and those two worlds just don't line up naturally.

fiona_murray4d ago

Gotta push back on that a little. Good token systems work when both sides agree on a single source of truth, not when you're trying to bridge two different naming worlds with duct tape.