Medium Day Deck for ‘How to Name Tokens in a Design System’

Kevin Muldoon
11 min readAug 13, 2023
There I am, ready to talk tokens!

https://app.hopin.com/events/medium-day-2023/replay/Um91bmR0YWJsZVJlY29yZGluZ0FyY2hpdmU6MTkzODcy

Hello, I’m Kevin Muldoon, and I’m a Lead Design Technologist for the Unified Design System team at Dow Jones which publishes The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, and others.

Design Technologists are a blend of creative and development skills, so we understand the needs of both designers and engineers, which is essential for the success of design system adoption to see both sides to create an effective system.

I write about design systems on Medium.com and develop technologies for design systems such as the Genome Color Tool. I have helped build and architect design systems at several companies.

At Dow Jones last year, I proposed and implemented the ‘Tokens First Strategy’ to increase the scope of our design system to support native iOS and Android for white-label and dark-mode support.

Today's topic

‘How to name design tokens in a design system’ is a topic near and dear to my heart because they are the cornerstone of any design system, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes which I’m hoping you don’t have to do yourself. I discovered that correctly naming tokens is essential to scale…

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Kevin Muldoon

Design Systems @ Dow Jones | Technologist, writer, speaker, and creator of genomecolor.space