Can we talk about how we treat design tokens

I spent months building a huge token library in Figma, but a dev on my team in Austin asked me to just hand over the raw JSON file last Tuesday. Has anyone else had their process questioned like that?

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michaelcoleman6mo ago

Used to get so mad when engineers asked for the raw files. Thought they were trying to cut me out of the process. Then I saw how our last project got built with three different blues because my perfect Figma tokens never made it into the code. Now I just give them the JSON first thing. It turns into a single source of truth we both actually use. The handoff feels less like a fancy presentation and more like we're actually building the same thing.

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river1836mo ago

Three different blues? That's the stuff of nightmares, @nathang67.

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nathang676mo ago

Totally. I read a blog post that called this "designing with the code in mind." It's way better than just handing off a pretty picture.

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