Rant: my dev team threw out my design system tokens after 2 years of work

Last week I found out my team replaced all my carefully named color tokens with hex codes hardcoded into the CSS. I built that system 2 years ago after pulling 3 all nighters to fix our old mess. They said it was "faster for now" but now we've got 14 shades of blue that all look the same. Has anyone else watched their design system get ignored after the handoff?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric3591d ago

That "faster for now" line is a classic sign they never really bought into the system. You gotta build a quick lookup tool or linter that auto-rejects hex codes and forces them to use your tokens. If you don't lock it down, they'll keep falling back to what's fastest every time.

bailey.sandra1d ago

Didn't I see a study saying teams waste like 30% of time on color decisions without tokens?