Color in Design System
Color in Design Systems is managed through a structured color palette and color system, which are crucial for maintaining visual consistency across a brand's digital products. This system is often built using design tokens, specifically color tokens, which standardize colors and ensure that they are applied uniformly across various components and interfaces. Each color token is assigned a semantic name, such as "text-primary", "background-secondary" or "error", to indicate its purpose and usage within the UI. This semantic naming helps designers and developers quickly understand and implement the color system, enhancing the design process and ensuring that each color fulfills its intended role, whether it's drawing attention, indicating actions, or conveying mood.
What is a Color Token?
Color tokens in a Design System are specific values assigned to colors that define the visual identity of a product. These tokens serve as reusable variables for colors, ensuring consistency across a platform’s various components and interfaces. By using color tokens, Design Systems allow for easy updates and maintenance of color schemes, ensuring that any changes made to a color token are automatically reflected throughout the product. This approach enhances both the efficiency and scalability of design processes, as it allows teams to manage color schemes systematically and consistently.
Key concepts explained
A color design token is like a traffic light in a city. Imagine every traffic light in the city has the same color for "stop," "go," and "slow down." This consistency helps drivers immediately understand what to do, no matter which intersection they’re at.
In the same way, a color design token assigns specific names and meanings to colors, like "button-primary-hover" for important buttons or "bg-error" for background of warning messages. Just as traffic lights use the same colors everywhere to guide drivers safely, color design tokens ensure that the right colors are used consistently across all parts of a product. This makes it easy for users to understand the interface and ensures a cohesive experience, just like how uniform traffic lights make driving easier and safer.
How to use Color in Design System?
For example, GitHub’s Design System, utilizes color tokens to manage its color palette across all of its products. Primer defines color tokens like `bg-default` for default background colors, `text-primary` for primary text colors, and `border-muted` for subtle border colors. These tokens help ensure that colors are used consistently throughout GitHub’s platform, from the website to the mobile app. If GitHub decides to change the shade of a primary color for better accessibility or a brand refresh, they can simply update the corresponding color token. This change will automatically propagate across all UI elements that use the token, ensuring a seamless and consistent update across the entire platform.