Re: [community-group] The Designer’s Workflow (#43)

Loving the discussion here so far.

> Tokens should be authored in a hybrid tool that is neither an existing design tool, nor an existing engineering tool. Fundamentally, systems design is a unique form of design that is a prerequisite to the creation of tokens. We need that tool.

I think I agree with the spirit of this but also with @lukasoppermann. There's every reason for design or engineering tools to be capable of authoring tokens and they already are. I can open Figma or VS Code, record a specific value, preview it to some degree, and reuse it. If that's what I need to do, then great! That capability isn't likely to go anywhere. We can create and manipulate tokens without designing an entire system. If I handpick my favorite font families from around the web and use them on my personal site and business cards, those can still be tokens, right? Can't a system arise from the tokens chosen, rather than the tokens being an artifact of the system?

Those tools don't offer many ways to visualize or manipulate the relationships between tokens, as a set. Generative tools like Leonardo, Colorbox.io, and visual type scale calculators have their own place in my workflow. I use them at different stages and with different goals than when using 'systems of record' or applying the tokens in practice.

A new system design tool that tries to own more than one aspect of token generation, management, storage, and application might be better than the disparate web of current tools. To what extent would vary by tool and team. Given enough time, it's likely that a general purpose implementation would grow pretty complex to meet the needs of enterprise customers.

I'd prefer a common token interface upon which we could build token pipelines or services. Connecting all the great tools we have would be a greater boon to my workflow than any new token authoring program. Large orgs could build transformers to interpolate through CIELAB or re-implement `lighten` without baking in complexity for folks trying to curate hex codes. The current landscape is diverse, flexible, and incrementally adoptable - hopefully we can keep those attributes while improving interoperability.

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Received on Saturday, 17 October 2020 20:06:13 UTC