Design Token Architecture - Brad and Ian Frost - CSS Day 2025

The digital landscape is more complex than ever; your organization needs to support a diversity of digital products, platforms, brands, frameworks, color modes, and more. While design systems unlock much-needed efficiency & consistency, each product has its own unique design needs. Can we provide the benefits of shared systems without forcing everything to look exactly the same? The answer is design tokens! For over a decade, we've helped dozens of organizations — including some of the world's largest! — create design token systems to help them strike the balance between consistency/efficiency and expression/innovation. It's hard and tricky work! Slides: https://cssday.nl/2025/subatomic-talk-css-day.pdf *** A session from CSS Day, the CSS conference. Each June in Amsterdam; see https://cssday.nl for more information. Conference announcements in your inbox? https://cssday.nl/subscribe