We have started giving names to our decisions, and it is changing how design and engineering speak to each other.
A token is a small, dull, quietly useful thing. It is a name for a value. Not a blue, but the blue that means primary action. Not sixteen pixels, but the space that separates a thing from the thing beneath it.
It sounds like bookkeeping and it is closer to language. The moment a decision has a name, it can be discussed, questioned, and reused. Before tokens, a designer handed over a picture and an engineer measured it by eye, and every measurement was a fresh chance to be slightly wrong. Now we are both pointing at the same word.
What I like is that it forces a designer to know why. You cannot name a value you have not decided on. Half the tokens I have tried to write down have shown me that I had two blues doing the same job and had never once noticed, because on a canvas nobody makes you say it out loud.
The risk, which I can already see coming, is that a system with a beautiful vocabulary can still be saying nothing. Tokens make a design consistent. They cannot make it good. A perfectly systematised mediocre product is still mediocre, and now it is mediocre at scale and harder to change.
But I will take the shared language. For a while now the seam between design and code has been the place where quality quietly leaked out. Anything that makes that seam thinner is worth the bookkeeping.