Senior dev told me to stop over-engineering my design tokens

My lead at a startup in Austin told me to cut my color token system from 200 entries down to 30. I thought he was crazy but he said just use shades for primary, secondary, and neutral. Three months later I was glad I listened because the team actually adopted the system instead of ignoring it. Has anyone else had a developer push back on token complexity and it ended up helping?

2 comments

2 Comments

max3887d ago

Yeah exactly, I think a lot of people get caught up in making the system perfect before anyone even uses it. Like you'll spend weeks mapping out every shade for every possible scenario but then nobody touches it because it's too confusing. The 80/20 rule really applies here. Most teams only need like 5-10 colors max for 90% of their work. Everything else is just noise that slows everyone down. Good on your lead for catching that early before it became a mess.

reese5517d ago

The 80/20 rule works well here but it's actually closer to 90/10 in practice from what I've seen. Most teams end up using the same 2 or 3 base colors for everything once they get comfortable. The extra shades just create more decisions than necessary and bog down the actual work. Always better to start small and add complexity only when it's really needed.