My lead designer told me to build the tokens first, and I should have listened

We started our design system for a new fintech app in January, and I was all about building components first. My lead, Sarah, kept saying 'get your color and spacing tokens sorted before you touch a button' but I thought that was overkill. Two months in, we had to change our primary blue for accessibility, and I had to manually update 47 different component files. It took our team three full days to fix everything. Has anyone else learned this the hard way, or am I the only one who ignored the obvious advice?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow_lee4d ago

Wait, you had to change FORTY-SEVEN files by HAND? That is a genuine nightmare, I would have lost my mind. Sarah was totally right, tokens are the absolute foundation for a reason. It feels like extra work at the start but it saves you from that exact disaster. My old team skipped it once and we had the same thing happen with our border radius, it was brutal. Never making that mistake again.

mark_fisher484d ago

Man, that sounds like a brutal way to learn the lesson. I can't even imagine the headache of updating all those files. Your lead designer definitely knew what she was talking about.