Confessions from a design team of one - Episode 1
As promised, here’s the monthly recap of my confessions so you can choose if and when you want to dive in deeper.
Thank you so much for subscribing!
In the last month, I’ve made 4+ confessions 🙈
#1 I’ve spent most of my career working as a design team of one, solving problems for companies you’ve probably never heard of.
It can be pretty lonely without a team of people who understand what you do to collaborate with. In my Pro Tips from a Design Team of One talk at the Into Design Systems conference in 2023 I shared some practical survival tips and token pro tips.
I also announced I’ll tackle “how to name design tokens” for my talk this year alongside Romina Kavcic of thedesignsystem.guide
#2 If I have to maintain my design token documentation manually, I just won’t do it.
It’s 2024. Ain’t nobody got time for static documentation that requires copy and pasting to maintain it.
In this 2 part series, I explain what living documentation is, share my personal documentation templates in a Figma community file and walk through how to use the Automator plugin with Tokens Studio to automate the process.
#3 Every time I want to swap out a font family, something breaks along the way. 🤬
I'm sharing what I know about font weight and font family acting like a "pair" in Figma and how I work around that in Tokens Studio to help you avoid frustrating errors.
There’s a link to a video walkthrough and Figma community file on how to work with typography tokens in Tokens Studio by importing the exact settings from Figma.
#4 I'm a bit of a "type-A" person. When I see the border radius of something in Figma set to 13.34 I start to twitch a little bit.
I know I should be ok with values that aren’t whole numbers, and the 4 or 8-pixel grid is an (arguably) outdated design practice, but I’m just not there yet. I also love that I can change the value of one token watch it ripple through all of my typography or dimension design decisions.
In the last 2 years, I’ve spent longer than I’d like to admit figuring out how the math package used by Tokens Studio works under the hood and created some pretty fancy math equations to deal with my twitching…
Thank you for your support and encouragement to share with you what I know, and the “WTF Figma” moments I experience.
Feel free to reach out if you have questions, suggestions, or any of your own confessions you’d like to share. (:
Hey Sam, having just stumbled upon some of your posts you touch on some very good points that I wrap my head around every day as well! I would like to know more about how your dev handover works with tokens studio..
I have been reluctant to use it as it requires a plugin to be used which complicates things with other team members / also it could possibly stop working for whatever reason which is not ideal although i know tokens studio is well funded at the moment.
If you could share any insights on the handover process and how the devs use tokens studio that would be awesome! Perhaps a future post even if there is enough info