The Many Faces of Themeable Design Systems

There’s a ton of great stuff in here. I have been working on a project that essentially supports “multiple brands”, and this is super cool to see! It’s given me some ideas for what direction I’d like to move toward. The “three-tiered token architecture” is something I have already been setting up after seeing Google’s Material 3 do something very similar. They call their tiers 1) reference, 2) system, and 3) component which I like the sound of.

I like the distinction between marketing sites and apps, and how we might create a system that works for both. One common request for marketing sites is to use large sections of brand colors, in which case it sometimes makes sense to treat that section of the page as a “dark mode”, where the system colors get reset to new values so that everything has enough contrast. I have done some work on that, but I’d like to revisit that and see how it fits into a larger ecosystem.