Workshop: How to build a Design System with Design Tokens in Figma - Jan Six

Learn how to create and apply Design Tokens in Figma. With Figma Tokens you will be able to easily customize and maintain your Design System and create Themes (e.g Light & Dark Themes) within minutes.

Live hands-on workshop 🎬 recording designing token-based design systems in Figma utilizing the plugin "Figma Tokens" - Newly updated content

⏱ Duration: 180 minutes
🙋🏽‍♂️ Workshop facilitator: Jan Six, Creator of Figma Tokens Plugin & Sr. Product Designer at GitHub

In this workshop, you will create tokens for choices that drive your design system's foundations and components. By using the plugin we'll be able to store the tokens on a single source of truth, enabling designers and developers to both access the same design tokens.

What's inside - Preview:

🎬 Sessions

🎬 What's new in Figma Tokens:

- Easier to use references
- Create shadow tokens with multiple levels
- Reference shadow & type tokens 
- Deep references for shadow & type tokens 
- Annotating tokens can be semi-automated 
- A new and improves inspect mode 
- More sync options: GitHub, GitLab, URL sync (read only)

🎬 How to create Design Tokens in Figma:

- Color Tokens
- Spacing Tokens
- Radius Tokens 
- References
- Math
- Typography Tokens 
- Shadow Tokens

🎬 Token-sets and Theming

- What are Design Tokens?
- Naming Conventions
- Light Theme & Dark Theme
- Simple Tokens Sets
- Complex Token Sets
- Sets vs. Themes in Figma Tokens

🎬 How to create token sets & themes

- How to do cross-file theming 
- Getting tokens across files 
- Enable GitHub & use tokens 

🎬 Component tokens & collaboration

- Component Tokens
- Create & apply component tokens 
- Communicating applied design tokens
- Handoff
- Getting tokens to developers
- Exporting Tokens 
- Transforming Design Tokens
- Style Dictionary

🎬 Best Practices

- Convert your existing design system
- Use the Multi Inspector
- Create fluid scales
- Create theme independent shadows
- Use branching
- Approval / Review
- How to document
- Encourage contributions 

Q&A with Jan 

🎬 Video snippet from our previous event:

⭐️Praise from the community:

"Best workshop ever"

Karla

"This is exactly what I was looking for! Great work"

Janam

"This is amaziiiinggg!!!! working on a multi-brand. This will make work easy for me. I have been looking for this much flexibility. And this is just it for me."

Samuel

"Ok ... mind blown ..."

Jay