Design Tokens: An Emerging Standard

Something quietly important just happened in the world of design systems.

The Design Tokens Community Group published the latest draft of its technical report, representing a significant a step towards formalizing a shared standard for how “design tokens,” which are small, reusable pieces of design information like colour values, spacing, typography scales etc are represented and exchanged between tools. For large organizations managing multiple brands, platforms, and digital products, this is potentially transformative.

What is the purpose of design tokens?

The design token standard is about making design decisions machine-readable and interoperable. It aims to turn what has traditionally been human interpretation into structured data that can be automatically translated into code. What that means in practice is that when a company changes a colour, a font, or a spacing rule, that change can propagate through design tools, codebases, and documentation simultaneously, without the slow, error-prone cascade of manual updates.

For businesses operating at scale, this solves a problem that’s grown quietly but massively over the past decade: design drift. The more products, teams, and markets a company spans, the more its brand becomes fragmented. A slightly different blue here, an outdated button there, a bypassed spacing rule somewhere else. Every inconsistency chips away at brand recognition. What design tokens promise, when standardized, is a way to unify how design intent travels through an organization.

What does standardization of design tokens unlock?

Though the cost savings associated with this are potentially significant, the more interesting ramifications are strategic. Standardized tokens mean design can scale the way code scales. The same principles of version control, governance, and automation that power engineering systems can now apply to visual and experiential consistency. For an organization with many teams building on different tech stacks, this becomes the connective tissue between brand and implementation. A company can roll out a new visual identity in weeks, not quarters. It can experiment with high-contrast accessibility themes or dark mode without breaking visual coherence.

It goes without saying that design tokens only deliver value when design, engineering, and product teams agree to work from the same source of truth and to treat those tokens as living assets, not files checked into a folder and forgotten. Governance becomes critical: who owns the tokens, how changes are reviewed, what downstream systems they touch. The draft specification anticipates this need with features like aliasing, grouping, and deprecation rules but the organizational process around it matters as much as the format itself.

How to get prepared and stay prepared

Design tokens are part of a larger foundational layer of digital operations. They turn brand decisions into structured data, design systems into infrastructure, and aesthetic consistency into something measurable and manageable. As this specification edges toward maturity, organizations that treat design tokens as a strategic capability will find themselves able to adapt faster, scale more cleanly, and express their brands with more coherence across every touchpoint.

How we're responding to the new standards

In response, we’ve built an operational pipeline that connects design directly to code. A system that lets us deliver on-brand digital experiences faster while freeing our teams to focus on upstream, strategic priorities. By aligning this infrastructure with the emerging design token standard, we’re ensuring that every element of our system speaks the same language as the broader ecosystem of tools and technologies our clients rely on to scale.

The result is a foundation they can trust will stay relevant as technology evolves, reduce friction between design and development, and give them the ability to move faster and further without adding new layers of risk.