New Chapter Drop: Design Systems At Scale
Token Workflows Across Platforms and Teams
Hey everyone! Chapter 24 of Mobile System Design just went live, and this one's special. It’s called Design Systems at Scale; Token Workflows Across Platforms and Teams. This is the conclusion of our entire design system journey. What started as one chapter somehow turned into SIX chapters. What a ride!
If you already own the book, you can grab the latest version (v0017) here.
In case you haven’t gotten the book yet, you can buy it at www.mobilesystemdesign.com.
The Journey We've Been On:
Remember when we started with "how do you even begin implementing a design system?" We went from replacing inline values with something called tokens, to figuring out how to get your team to actually migrate to this new semantic UI, to turning those tokens into a proper design system. And now we're ending with full-blown multi-platform automation. It's been quite the evolution.
This Chapter Tackles:
You know that moment when you realize your iOS app has different spacing than Android, even though they're supposed to match? Or when updating a color requires hunting down five different developers and hoping nothing gets lost in translation? This chapter starts with why manual token syncing falls apart as teams grow.
I walk you through building a centralized token system using JSON that works across iOS, Android, (and sometimes even… dare I say it … web). You'll see how to set up naming conventions to align mobile devs with designers, create two-way sync between Figma and code, and handle those inevitable platform-specific differences between Android and iOS engineers, all while ensuring they stay friends.
The best part is that we go from manual copy-paste workflows all the way to fully automated CI pipelines that handle everything for you. Validation, code generation, documentation updates, even opening pull requests or uploading versioned token packages.
What's Next:
This wraps up our entire "scaling up UI" section of the third book. Mission accomplished! Next up, we're shifting gears to focus on scaling up entire apps using modularization. The journey continues and after this, is coming to an end.
Quick Update:
I also fixed a navigation issue in the PDF! You can now tap on any chapter in the table of contents and it will jump directly to that section. Much better reading experience.
If you want to know the geeky reason why: I had trouble getting my covers to work. So, I used to generate a book PDF, then used a different PDF tool to attach a cover to the generated PDF to make a full book. It worked! But, unfortunately this workaround broke the deep linking. But now, I got it working with a single PDF tool. Huzzah!
Check out Chapter 24 and see how this incredible design system journey comes full circle!
— Tjeerd
If you already own the book, you can grab the latest version (v0017) here.
In case you haven’t gotten the book yet, you can buy it at www.mobilesystemdesign.com.