Building scalable Design Systems with tokens and literal terminology

SCHEDULE: – the timezone is CET https://time.is/CET
6:45 PM – 7:00 PM : Warm-up / Socializing
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM: Building scalable Design Systems with tokens and literal terminology — A modern alternative to Atomic Design, Milber Ferreira – Design Systems Architect
8:30 PM – Open end Networking

The Token-driven Design Methodology is a modern approach to enhance how we build Design Systems at scale. The unnecessary complexity of the Atomic Design Methodology by Brad Frost inspired me to continue researching techniques to achieve scalable design systems that are fully understood by both design and development teams alike.

Surprisingly enough, there is not much out there to be found. Suppose you do a Google search for “atomic design alternatives.” In that case, the result is just a handful of articles, most of which only touch on specific pieces of the puzzle or extend on Atomic Design, including Brad Frost himself in his article “Extending atomic design.”

But what’s wrong with Atomic Design? The answer is, not much! Atomic Design is excellent as it provides a way to structure design systems. However, categorizing your design system like atoms, molecules, and organisms seems to be an overkill that can often become debatable in the details, especially across teams.

Using adequate vocabulary that reflects standard design and development practices is vital to define a design system’s taxonomy for everyone in a team to understand.

The implied hierarchy from using the atomic scale in atomic design’s categorization is not reason enough to introduce the other complexities inherited by the concept. No matter how complex a design system architecture is, it is likely it would never be nearly as complex as a living organism, so why introduce this complexity in the first place. By this, I don’t mean that a design system should be static. On the contrary, I believe that design systems should be living structures that accommodate and evolve according to business needs.

Token-driven Design builds upon the design and development knowledge we have gathered as an industry over the past few years and attempts to keep the core understandable and straightforward. Starting with the classification and high-level concepts of a system’s taxonomy and categorization — and utilizing design tokens as the system’s foundation.

Participants will learn how the Token-driven Design methodology facilitates more flexibility in design and front-end architectures and how to build a reliable tokens-system that allows for incredible power and flexibility when theming.