Status update (February 2021)

Hello, world! This is the first monthly Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG) update, where we’ll publish a summary of our activities and progress. If you have questions, comments, or ideas, please get in touch with us on GitHub, Twitter or by leaving a comment in this blog.

Draft specification

After months of research and discussions, the core team is now drafting the format specification. We’ll share it and request feedback with a small set of invited experts and design tool vendors at first, and open it up to the wider community shortly after. Watch this space!

Glossary

As design systems folks are fond of saying: “Naming is hard”! What, exactly, is a “design token”? Is an “alias” the same thing as a “reference”? What do we mean by the “type” of a token? To answer these questions and more, the DTCG has begun writing a glossary of terms.

The initial motivation was for the core team to agree upon and document some of the terminology that will be used in the specification, but we realized this will be a useful resource for the wider community too. Therefore, we are planning to publish our glossary on the designtokens.org website once it’s ready.

Vendor roundtable meeting

Finally, the DTCG is organizing a meeting with representatives from design tool makers around mid March. This will be an opportunity for us all to get to know each other, clarify key use-cases and hopefully get some of the vendors to contribute to our format specification.

Look out for news from that meeting in our future updates!