community-group VS plugin-samples

The initiative is open for contributions from individuals and is not owned by a specific company or organization. It is sponsored by various entities and supported by the community, including organizations like Open UI, W3C, and the Design Tokens Community Group.

Looking ahead, we aim to support native design token interoperability, aligning with the W3C community group’s ongoing standardization efforts. One of the major pieces we’re still working on is how modes and themes work within their spec. While we could launch our version now, we prefer to wait for a unified industry consensus to avoid fragmenting the space with conflicting standards.

I've done a LOT of dark mode work, to the point where I'd consider myself an expert here[1].

I'm not a fan of this. This solves one tiny aspect of the larger problem in a non-scalable way that will inevitably lead to bloat and inflexibility. It's a really a naive approach that hasn't taken into account design at scale, nor the future of where design is heading.

Typically when doing theming, you have two axes - a visual mode axis (i.e. light/dark/high contrast/colorblind modes/etc) and a theme axis (i.e. docs/sheets/slides, each with a different brand color). While this does solve an aspect of the visual mode axis, as soon as you add either a new theme or a visual accessibility mode, you'll be forced to refactor. I see that as codesmell.

I also don't think this helps support a better future of theming support. If we think about the future of theming, what we see today is a convergence of design patterns. Nearly everyone is doing theming at scale in at least roughly the same way (a semantic token layer that points to different primitive colors depending on the theme), and the differences between implementations continues to diminish over time. The convergence of patterns is a good thing - it means more code can be shared.

If you wanted to actually solve theming, what you should work for is not a constrained helper function like light-dark(), but instead a shared token schema. Today nearly every company has their own token schema and different ways of naming things in the semantic token layer. If we had a shard language here, not only would it be trivial to add light/dark theming (just redefine a few variables that are already provided for you), code could be shared between sites and inherit the theming/branding.

[1] Most recently leading Figma's dark mode stream, and currently leading their variables feature work to enable others to easily do light/dark/etc. I've consulted with 50+ enterprise tier companies on their theming. Also contributed to the W3C design token proposal for theme/mode support: https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/210. Previously worked on Jira's dark mode + a few other projects.

I had to do some reading on the actual W3 spec here, and I think I see what you're saying about compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem. Assigning a component or instance as a variable would probably be something like using an entire function as a token, which isn't one of the supported types. (Neither is Boolean though, which Figma does support, but maybe behind the scenes that's just a numeric 0 or 1?)

One item to call out though is the W3C draft support. Unfortunately we need to wait until they add a way to handle theming for tokens before we can implement it. We're working with them closely on this, and as soon as it's in the spec, we'll support it.

Discussion on github for it is here: https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/210

Hello! I don't have experience creating the tokens in Figma specifically, but there are some general best practices (erhm, let's call them suggestions, a design token standard is on its way!) you'll want to keep in mind.

This looks really good /u/MediocreAdeptness38! I think you have discovered design tokens here. There's a ton of exploration being done in this space, and many people are arriving at conclusions similar to yours. There isn't a standard (yet!), but there are a ton of best practices that go into architecting your design tokens.

We have an open source plugin that can help you create copies of your styles as variables here: https://github.com/figma/plugin-samples/tree/master/styles-to-variables