A day before Config, teams from GitHub and Figma hosted a dev community event with lightning talks. The recordings are finally available.

In the first talk, Katie Langerman, Staff Systems Designer at GitHub, shares how designing, testing, and shipping new design tokens at scale without disrupting users requires meticulous planning and care. She discusses how the Primer design system team revamped Primer Primitives with a new naming convention and build process, connecting core Figma libraries with code.

A big update to the Tokens Studio plugin introduces W3C DTCG format support, new variables exporting experience, using variables inside styles, typography tokens, and more.

An incredible plugin made by Chen Chen that helps manage and synchronize variable changes. It works as a Git client for variables, letting you track changes, save and restore versions, generate a changelog, export variables to CSS, or sync to GitHub. I bet this plugin will soon become a staple of all design system teams.

Tokenbase is a free tool for creating, managing, and distributing design tokens. Easily create your design systems and export tokens to code in a few clicks. It’s currently in beta, and I wonder if importing from Figma is on the roadmap?

Sam shares math equations she used in Token Studio to build all sorts of dimension tokens and even a proportional scale that snaps to a 4 or 8 pixel grid. This guide uses typography as an example, but the same ideas apply to sizing and spacing. There is even a free playground in the Community.

A super useful video from Akbar, a Developer Advocate at Figma: ​“Want to sync your Figma Variables with your codebase? In this video, we’ll show you how to use our Variables GitHub Action example repo to sync your Figma Variables to your codebase and vice versa.”

A solid roundup of the design systems resources from one of the most respected conferences.

A new video in the Introduction to design systems course by Figma explains design tokens.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer shares some common questions, answers, and resources that she came across when learning about design systems, tokens, and variables. 

Designer Advocate Anthony DiSpezio recommends the best approach for defining variables for theming: primitive variable → semantic variable → semantic style. The core advice is to keep using styles: ​“Styles represent a group of properties that should be applied to a layer or part of a layer. Variables represent individual values within that style.”

(Years ago, I noticed that when Apple announces a change at WWDC it’s better to go with it even if it doesn’t make sense at the moment — they see the roadmap much further. I wonder if it’s the same case with Figma and styles. At the moment they often feel redundant, but Figma made it very clear that they’re not going anywhere — hopefully something will make it clear soon why it was worth keeping them around.)

“Demystify the synergy between Figma Variables, Figma Styles, and Tokens Studio — a trio of ways composed to develop your design token workflow.”

Great article getting into the nitty gritty details of tokens — why the design community had to invent them, where the influence came from, what problem they solved, how they were adopted by the design tools, and why all of that is happening now. ​“Design tokens are the first time in a lot of years that designers get to step up in the abstraction tower, and think in terms of meaning and purpose rather than concrete hard-coded values. This is a big cultural shift — but an inevitable one.”

In this video, Sam walks through the features in the Tokens Studio plugin for Figma that allow the creation of variables that are synced to design tokens.

A preview of the design lint plugin for identifying and fixing issues like missing tokens or styles.

A new plugin from the Tokens Studio: ​“Already have your variables set up and want to bulk apply them to your work? You can swap styles with variables or apply variables that match raw number values to elements in any file with access to your variables collections!” See also the walkthrough video.

Interested in learning how to migrate from Styles to Variables? Join Luis Ouriach, Akbar Mizra, Jacob Miller from Figma, and Jack Minogue from Ford for a look at approaches you can use to lower the friction of your rollout of variables.

Carly Ayres from Figma sat down with the people working across design systems tooling both inside and outside Figma to understand what the rise of tokens and features like variables mean for the future of design systems.

Intuit is the parent company for products such as Quickbooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Intuit Design System (IDS) is used as a foundational system that other multidimensional design systems are built on top of. Nate Baldwin wrote about creating a design token taxonomy for it: ​“Token names are how design tokens are referenced and identified by consumers. But at the core, a ​“name” is more of an ordered representation of a catalog system and API. This catalog system and API is also known as a token taxonomy. Building a clear taxonomy assisted us in appropriately and consistently classifying tokens, as well as providing a scalable and predictable naming convention for consumers.”

Continuing with taxonomy, check out this discussion about naming tokens for a toggle switch UI element. Don’t miss the insight from Ryhan on how Figma approached this in their UI2 design system.

Good thread by W3C’s Design Tokens Community Group on Figma variables, and how they differ from the spec. Great to see that Figma is actively collaborating with the community group on adding modes to the specification, and already built sample plugins for importing and exporting DTCG-compliant JSON files. (BTW, if you ever wondered what the variables icon was based on — now you know.)