Design tokens are baseline literacy now, not a nice-to-have

Design tokens (colour, spacing, radius values defined once and reused everywhere) have moved from 'advanced design systems topic' to expected practice across teams. If you're not naming your values, you're behind the curve.

Design Systems News has been tracking token-based workflows becoming the default way teams manage scale across brands and platforms — colour, spacing, and type defined once as tokens rather than hard-coded per screen. This isn't new tech, but it's now assumed knowledge rather than a specialism. Penpot's open, standards-based architecture (SVG/CSS under the hood) actually makes tokens easier to reason about than in some closed tools, since the underlying values map more directly to code. That's worth knowing if you're comparing Penpot and Figma for a system-heavy project. This is established practice, not a trend — the shift already happened, you just need to catch up if you haven't.

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