Author: M4Design
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truncation tokens: the line limit nobody named
Every card eventually runs into text it doesn’t have room for, and most systems never decided what happens next. Look at a real notification feed for five minutes and you’ll find the bug: a message cut off mid-word with no ellipsis, or a comment card that just grows however tall the copy happens to be.…
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focus ring tokens: the accessibility feature people delete without meaning to
`outline: none;` is one line of CSS that quietly breaks keyboard navigation for every user tabbing through the page. Here’s how to token a real focus ring instead.
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tabs tokens: the underline isn’t deciding anything on its own
Every tab bar in your product slides to a slightly different beat because nobody named the four decisions that actually control it. A settings page, a dashboard, an email client: three different surfaces, and in most codebases, three different opinions about how far apart the tab labels sit, how much padding wraps each one, how…
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form input tokens: the four states nobody agreed on
Default and focus get styled. Error and disabled get invented on the spot, differently, every time. Here’s how to name and token all four input states.
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skeleton tokens: name the wait, not just the shape
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in Accessibility, Buttons, Components, css, Educational, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, UI KIt, UI/UX, WCAG, Web DesignThe four seconds before content arrives are not a mystery state. They are a design decision waiting for tokens. Most design systems cover the loaded state in detail and leave the loading state to whatever the frontend framework ships by default, usually a spinner with no clock and no shape. Skeleton tokens close that gap…
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empty states: the screen everyone forgets to design
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in Accessibility, Buttons, Components, css, Educational, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, UI KIt, UI/UX, WCAG, Web DesignThe loaded state gets a spec. The empty one gets whatever someone types at 2am before launch. Every product has a moment where a screen has nothing in it yet: a new account with no files, a search with no results, a dashboard before the first data point lands. Teams spend real time on the…
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how to bake wcag aa into your token file from day one
Contrast ratios, touch targets, focus rings, semantic pairing — here’s exactly what to write in your token file to bake WCAG AA in from day one.
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density tokens: the row height nobody agreed on
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in Accessibility, Buttons, Components, css, Educational, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, UI KIt, UI/UX, WCAG, Web DesignEvery screen ends up with its own row height, because nobody wrote down when to use which one. Dashboards, settings pages, and email templates all render the same kind of row, but each one usually gets a hand-picked pixel value: 36px here, 51px there, whatever looked right in the moment. Density tokens fix this by…
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status tokens: no new colors, just roles
Every team hits the same moment: the app needs a success state and an error state, and someone picks two new hex codes that have never appeared in the design file before. Those two colors turn into four within a sprint (warning, info) and none of them were chosen against the palette that already shipped.…
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border radius tokens: rounding corners on purpose instead of by accident
4px on the input, 6px on the card, 12px on the modal — nobody decided the modal should be softer. Here’s how to name four radius steps on purpose.
