How many tokens do you have?

A colleague asked me how many Design Tokens we had in the new version of our Design System. This was just to pad a slide with some interesting numbers, but it's a very difficult question to answer if you are using a DTCG based system, with its resolvers and modifiers.

In thinking about this, I've so far managed to come up with five quantitative measures, each of which is wrong, and one qualatitive measure, which is correct.

Token Names: 929

Our design system, at time of writing, defines the names of 929 tokens. Many of these are automatically managed to meet the needs of the resolver, but this is clearly far too many to pass on to our consumers.

Public Token Names: 173

The power of a DTCG Token System is its ability to express the value of a token as a combination of a token name plus a series of decisions.

This allows us to significantly reduce the surface area of tokens that our users will ever need to use to a much more manageable number.

Even within this set of tokens, the majority won't need to be used and are merely there as escape hatches for when the system doesn't quite meet the needs of the user. The meaningful number is much lower.

Token Values: 2,453

What's a token without a value? Pretty useless. In a DTCG modifier, each token must be given a value according for each context of that modifier. Along with the simple sets, this results in a count of 2,453 token values that need defining, which again is far too many.

Authored Token Values: 1,065

This (marginally) more reasonable number is the number of token values that require a creative decision by a designer, rather than merely reflecting the token structure for the resolver.

Of these authored values, 193 are physical values – that is, a color, a size – and the rest are aliases. Even these often follow a set of rules that means designers need only make a handful of decisions^[1].

Resolved Token Values: 300 billion

In a DTCG Token System, the final resolved value of a token depends on the current permutation. We have about 40 billion permutations (at time or writing). Not all tokens are sensitive to all modifiers, but the theoretical upper bound^[2] is in the hundreds of billions. This is a completely meaningless number as we know that in the end all the tokens must resolve to no more than 193 values.

How many tokens?

So far we've narrowed down the quantification of our Token System to somewhere between 173 and 300 billion. I think we can agree that this a fairly wide range which tells us precisely nothing.

The best answer to "How many tokens are in your Design System?" is "That's the wrong kind of question", but if pushed I'd say the second best answer is "ENOUGH".

Your Token System exists solely to serve your Design System. They exist as an artifact that falls out from the development of the overall System, rather than as something used as an input to its creation.