As an old-school designer, I didn’t like the term at first, but to be honest it is winning me.

I was taught design in terms of design models and design systems, so there was not much of a leap to “design token” as referring to a building block.

I am not 100% sure how I feel about it in general. If I was a designer who was only given freedom to operate within a set of tokens, I would certainly feel like my hands are tied. At the same time, I can see how even while using tokens it is entirely possible to design a bad interface. However, I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs.

> I also see value of them when it comes to maintaining consistent and intuitive UIs

Absolutely. It's like the proper legacy of the GoF's "Design Patterns" book, whose lack of importance and acceptance has bewildered me for close on 30yrs now. Of course, it also means I have rich fields to till for my own work, so bwahaha :-)

[Note that the actual design patterns described in their book are not the important part; their understanding that we must implement software using patterns is their most important concept.]

You can already imagine OS vendors publishing their design tokens to let you "easily" integrate your applications even if not using their UI libraries.