What Are Design Tokens?

Pioneered by Jina Anne at Salesforce during the creation of the Lightning Design System, design tokens are the indivisible, platform-agnostic design decisions that power a design system.

Instead of hardcoding raw values like #0052CC or 16px across dozens of CSS stylesheets, iOS Swift structs, and Android XML files, teams store these decisions as named variables in a central, version-controlled repository:

{
  "color": {
    "brand": {
      "primary": { "value": "#0052cc" }
    }
  }
}

When a token value is updated, an automated build pipeline compiles the tokens into CSS variables, iOS Swift constants, and Android XML resources, synchronizing every platform in seconds.