In the dynamic world of digital product design, maintaining consistency across multiple brands while allowing flexibility for unique identities has become an increasingly complex challenge. Enter design tokens—an essential component of scalable, multibrand design systems that promise to streamline UI/UX workflows, reduce redundancy, and promote cohesion. But what are design tokens, and how can companies effectively leverage them across various brands under a unified system?
What Are Design Tokens?
Design tokens are platform-agnostic representations of visual style attributes. They encapsulate core design elements such as color, typography, spacing, border radii, and more into modular fragments of data that can be reused efficiently across platforms and brands.
These tokens are often stored in either JSON or YAML formats and are consumed by design tools and codebases to ensure that every UI component remains visually consistent while still being highly maintainable. By abstracting design decisions into tokens, teams can establish a single source of truth and significantly reduce the amount of manual updating required across product lines.
The Need for Multibrand Design Systems
Many enterprises manage a portfolio of products and services, each tailored to specific audiences. As these companies grow and evolve, maintaining brand-specific identities while ensuring system-wide design consistency becomes increasingly difficult.
- Redundant efforts: Without a shared system, teams often recreate design assets for each brand, leading to duplicated work.
- Inconsistent user experience: A lack of shared structure can result in clashing interfaces and incoherent experiences.
- Scalability issues: Growing product ecosystems demand agility, and a fragmented design approach hampers scalability.
To address these pain points, design systems must evolve to support multiple brands while remaining adaptable and maintainable across different contexts.
Design Tokens as the Foundation
Tokens enable the creation of a layered architecture within design systems—starting from core primitives to progressively brand-specific expressions. This hierarchy generally includes:
- Global Tokens: These are system-wide constants, such as base font sizes or color values like
#FFFFFF, that apply across all brands. - Brand Tokens: These map global tokens to brand-specific values. For example, a “primary-color” token might be blue for Brand A and green for Brand B.
- Component Tokens: These apply tokens to components, such as buttons, cards, or modals, defining their spacing, typography, and colors based on corresponding brand tokens.
By utilizing this structure, organizations can create a scalable and flexible design token architecture that ensures both consistency and brand differentiation. Updates made at the global level can ripple through all products, while brand tokens allow for the personalization needed to support each product’s unique identity.
Implementing Tokens in a Multibrand Design System
Turning this theory into practice requires collaboration between design and development teams, along with the appropriate tools and frameworks. Here are the steps companies can take to implement design tokens smoothly:
1. Define Token Categories and Naming Conventions
Standardize how tokens are defined by agreeing on naming patterns that make tokens easy to identify and organize (e.g., color.brand.primary, spacing.sm, typography.heading.lg).
2. Use a Token Management Tool
Tools like Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio, or Figma Tokens plugin allow teams to create, transform, and distribute design tokens across platforms in a unified format.
3. Build a Theming System
Theming capabilities built into tokens allow for runtime switching between design variants (e.g., light/dark mode, regional editions, or brand versions). This enables teams to use the same underlying components while supporting multiple brand palettes and visual languages.
4. Integrate With Codebases
Tokens can be exported from design tools and compiled into consumable variables (e.g., CSS variables, Sass maps, JavaScript objects). Developers can then use these tokens directly to style components in frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular.
5. Document and Educate
Maintaining an up-to-date documentation site explaining how tokens are structured and used—and how different brand themes interact—is critical for adoption across teams. Design systems should include code examples, visual guidelines, and governance rules to ensure consistency.
Benefits of a Token-Based Multibrand System
- Consistency with flexibility: Core styles remain uniform across products, while tokens allow for brand-level customization.
- Faster development: Shared tokens accelerate prototyping and reduce implementation time.
- Improved collaboration: A shared system bridges the gap between designers and developers through a mutual language.
- Greater scalability: Future brand acquisitions or new product verticals can be onboarded into the system with minimal rework.
Case Study: A Hypothetical Platform
Imagine a fintech company managing three sub-brands: a consumer-facing mobile wallet, an enterprise banking dashboard, and a youth financial literacy app. Each targets a different audience, featuring distinct visual identities.
Using a shared design system underpinned by tokens, the company structures its system as follows:
- Global tokens: Typography scales, spacing rules, elevation layers.
- Brand tokens: Different primary colors, typography families, and imagery styles.
- Component tokens: A shared button component adjusts its look per brand but maintains the same logic and accessibility standards.
This approach ensures the platform remains scalable, reduces fragmentation, and leads to higher product quality across the board.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Design Tokens
With the increasing availability of tooling and support for token-based systems, more companies are beginning to explore advanced features like token APIs, dynamic tokens tied to user preferences, and automated design-to-code pipelines.
As tokens continue to bridge the gap between design and development, they will form the backbone of next-generation design systems that are as adaptable as they are powerful.
FAQs
- What tools are best for managing design tokens?
Tools like Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio, or Theme UI are commonly used to manage and transform design tokens across platforms. - How do tokens enable multibrand support?
Tokens enable brand-specific theming by abstracting design elements into modular variables that can be customized per brand without changing the core component logic. - Can tokens be used outside of web applications?
Yes. Design tokens are platform-agnostic and can be used for mobile apps (iOS/Android), design tools, voice interfaces, and more. - What’s the difference between design tokens and CSS variables?
CSS variables are one implementation of tokens. Design tokens are an overarching concept, and CSS variables are one way to operationalize them, especially for web platforms. - How do I maintain token governance across teams?
Set clear guidelines, use version control, provide automated linting tools, and ensure regular documentation updates to guide usage and prevent token misuse.