Every great design system starts with a strong foundation. Before creating a single component, you need to establish the building blocks: design tokens, naming conventions, and documentation principles that will guide every decision that follows.

What Are Design Tokens?

Design tokens are the atomic values of your design system—colors, spacing, typography, shadows, and more. They're the single source of truth that connects design to code, ensuring consistency across platforms and products.

Think of tokens as variables that store design decisions. Instead of hardcoding '#007AFF' everywhere, you use 'color-primary'. When the brand color changes, you update it in one place.

• Color tokens: primary, secondary, success, warning, error, neutrals
• Spacing tokens: 4px, 8px, 12px, 16px, 24px, 32px, 48px, 64px
• Typography tokens: font families, sizes, weights, line heights
• Shadow tokens: elevation levels for depth
• Border tokens: widths, radii, styles

Establishing Naming Conventions

Naming is one of the most important—and most debated—aspects of design systems. A good naming convention is consistent, intuitive, and scalable. It should make sense to both designers and developers.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton

Semantic vs. Primitive Naming

Primitive tokens describe what they are: 'blue-500', 'gray-100'. Semantic tokens describe their purpose: 'color-background', 'color-text-primary'. Best practice: define primitives, then map them to semantic tokens.

Documentation Principles

A design system is only as good as its documentation. If people can't find what they need, they'll create their own solutions—and consistency goes out the window.

• Document the 'why' as much as the 'what'
• Include usage guidelines and examples
• Show both correct and incorrect usage
• Keep documentation close to the code
• Make it searchable and browsable

Next Steps

With foundations in place, we're ready to start building components. In Part 2, we'll dive into component architecture: how to structure, compose, and variant your components for maximum flexibility and reusability.