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Just realized how much time I wasted on token naming until I compared two side-by-side

I was building out a color system for a project last month and got stuck on how to name everything. One approach I tried was super specific like "button-primary-hover-bg" and the other was more general like "surface-primary-hover". After laying them out on a board for the dev team to look at, the general approach won by a mile. The specific names made me rewrite whole tokens every time a design tweak happened, which was about 3 times a week. With the general names, I only had to update the core scale and everything else just followed along. The downside is the team had to learn a bit more about how the system connects, but after 2 weeks nobody complained. Has anyone else found a naming convention that killed their token overhead?
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2 Comments
ray210
ray21012d agoMost Upvoted
General naming saved my butt too. That's the way.
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danieljenkins
@ray210 is right but nobody's talking about compile time wins either.
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