Design System · Hexabinar Insight
Design Tokens that Travel Across Products
5 min read · Published by Hexabinar Design Engineering
Consistency isn’t a veneer—it’s infrastructure. At Hexabinar, design tokens are the single source of truth for visual and behavioral decisions across web, mobile, and dashboards. Tokens allow our UI to feel cohesive while enabling rapid iteration, theming, and accessibility from day one.
What we treat as tokens
- Color: roles (background, surface, text, border, focus, success, warning, danger).
- Typography: font families, sizes, line heights, letter spacing.
- Spacing & sizing: 4/8‑pt grids, radii, elevations.
- Motion: durations, easing, transforms with latency budgets.
- State: hover, focus, active, disabled, selected.
- Semantic data tones: teal for data links, green for primary CTAs.
Semantic first, raw later
We avoid hard‑coding raw values. Apps reference semantic tokens like color.text.muted
or elevation.card, which resolve to raw values per theme (light/dark, brand variants).
This decouples design intent from implementation and prevents drift across products.
Pipeline: from design to code
- Authoring: Tokens maintained centrally (e.g., design file + JSON source).
- Validation: linting for contrast ratios (WCAG 2.2 AA/AAA), naming, and collisions.
- Build: tokens compiled to platform targets (CSS variables, JS, iOS, Android).
- Distribution: versioned packages with changelogs (semver).
- Adoption: components consume tokens; apps consume components.
Accessibility and performance by default
- Contrast budgets: automated tests block tokens below AA for text/UI.
- Focus visibility: focus ring tokens ensure keyboard parity across surfaces.
- Motion limits: 150–250ms default durations, reduced‑motion fallbacks.
- Bundle hygiene: ship CSS variables, avoid duplicate token payloads.
Theming & scale
Products can shift brand accents (e.g., seasonal campaigns) without rewiring components. Dark mode is a theme, not a fork. Multi‑brand scenarios map semantic tokens to different palettes while keeping interaction states and accessibility rules intact.
Governance that keeps velocity high
Changes land via proposals reviewed by design engineering. We favor additive tokens over breaking edits; when deprecations are required, codemods help teams migrate safely. Dashboards surface adoption and drift.
Impact
- Fewer bugs: reductions in UI regressions tied to color/spacing by standardizing tokens.
- Faster delivery: feature teams build on stable primitives, not ad‑hoc styles.
- Brand coherence: consistent feel across surfaces increases trust and conversion.
What’s next
Extending motion and sound tokens for multimodal contexts, strengthening token analytics, and enriching our cross‑platform generator for emerging targets.