Design tokens are not a trend but a way to keep interface decisions in one place. Colour, spacing, radius and shadow live as variables instead of being repeated across forty files.
The payoff becomes obvious the moment you add a dark theme. With tokens it is a single layer of values; without them it is weeks of hunting hardcoded colours by hand.
Modern CSS makes this nearly free: custom properties, color-mix() and oklch() let you derive an entire palette from two or three base values and guarantee contrast along the way.
Checklist: where manual work hides in your company
Twelve questions that surface the processes eating dozens of hours a month — in about an hour.
Why a beautiful landing page brings no leads
Five reasons a pixel-perfect page loses to plain text on a white background — and what to fix first.