Confessions from a Design Team of One - Episode 2
This month brought the release of my Tailwind CSS community file and a New Approach to Naming Tokens.
Thank you for subscribing! Here’s a recap of my confessions this month so you can choose if you want to dig in a little deeper. 🫶
← Back to Episode 2 (Confessions 1-4)
#5 I spent a year loving to hate Tailwind CSS so you don’t have to.
One of the most frustrating experiences in my design career was trying to learn how Tailwind CSS works.
I was struggling to understand why the engineers I was working with were stuck in “primitives land” and wanted to battle about my desire to live in “semantic territory.”
Needless to say, I didn’t last long there.
However, to save other designers the painful process of learning about Tailwind, I’ve created a Figma community file as a resource for them.
The file has all the Tailwind CSS primitives as design tokens in Tokens Studio, which are attached to variables with names that match their Tailwind classes.
When you use the primitives in your designers, engineers inspecting your work will see tokens and variables with names that match their Tailwind CSS classes in code.
There are a ton of resources in the file to learn about Tailwind, and I covered the designer-friendly details of what makes Tailwind challenging and unique in confession #5.
#6 I've been mildly obsessing about naming design tokens for almost a year now.
It started as a curiosity, then a casual question I asked the community, “What do you call the names of the tiers of your design tokens?” went viral.
I did a LOT of research and realized that, as designers, we have inherited some bad habits of naming and structuring design tokens that we need to break!
I’m sharing my research and insights in this blog, in prep for my How to Name Design Tokens workshop I’m giving at the Into Design Systems conference in just a couple of weeks.
🔗 There's still a few spots to attend the conference, or you can buy the recordings!
What’s next?
While this month had fewer posts, these topics have been a long time in the making, and I’m not quite done with them yet.
I’ve got a few more posts on the naming tokens topic and a FigJam Community file with token naming templates in the works.
I’ll be working from the EU for the month of May, co-hosting and presenting at the Into Design Systems conference and meeting most of the Tokens Studio team for the first time!
As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions, curiosities or if you want to talk shop.
🫶 Sam I am