Design Tokens

A project that creates the public tokens available for all platforms which is built using style dictionary.

Quick Start

To get the project up an running, all you need to do is make sure your deps are installed for this workspace.

In the project root (not this workspace), run

yarn install

This will setup all workspaces in this repo in addition to install all the deps needed to successfully use this workspace.

There is no dev environment

With style-dictionary, you are just creating static Yaml files, so there is no dev server or anything to run while adding tokens. However, we highly recommend you make sure all extensions that are recommended are installed in order to prevent triggering errors in our CI process.

Project Structure

There are two types of tokens to create: private or public.

Base Tokens

These our all of the projects private tokens and single source of truth for each custom theme value (i.e. light, dark, flow-dark, etc.). Everything inside here will get filtered out during the build process. Private tokens are only meant to be used as reference items for public tokens.

Creating public tokens

Public tokens are the semantic tokens we ship to each team/product within Pluralsight. Therefore, it should rarely be updated or added to unless there is a new branding color/theme change.

This is to help keep all of our teams apps as performant as possible since the quanity and usage of tokens can make a negative impact in browsers.

Updating custom themes

If a theme needs to be updated (i.e. light, dark, flow-dark, etc.), all you need to do is edit the value in the tokens/base/<file>.yaml location. However, due to the custom tooling we are using, there are a few rules to consider:

• DO NOT EDIT ANYTHING IN THE PUBLIC DIRECTORY. These values source all the base tokens and should never be altered.
• DO NOT CHANGE PROJECT STRUCTURE OR FILE NAMES. We use a strict and complex filtering sytems that depends on both of these to be consistent.

Our base directory uses a file system that matches the PS Brand Theme color guide to help keep all of our themes consistent. For all themes, the "accent" correlates to the "default" semantic tokens.

Testing your updates

To test your updates, run the build command for this workspace in the project root (not this workspace).

yarn workspace @pluralsight/design-tokens run build

You should see something like this output:

Copying files...

Source style dictionary files created!

Running `style-dictionary build` to generate build artifacts.

js
✔︎ build/index.js

css
✔︎ build/css/variables.css

scss
✔︎ build/scss/_variables.scss

android
✔︎ build/android/font_dimens.xml
✔︎ build/android/colors.xml

ios
✔︎ build/ios/StyleDictionaryColor.h
✔︎ build/ios/StyleDictionaryColor.m
No properties for StyleDictionarySize.h. File not created.
No properties for StyleDictionarySize.m. File not created.

ios-swift
✔︎ build/ios-swift/StyleDictionary.swift

ios-swift-separate-enums
✔︎ build/ios-swift/StyleDictionaryColor.swift
No properties for StyleDictionarySize.swift. File not created.

Depending on which platform you are testing, just reference the build file created.