Sage Design Tokens

This repository contains the design tokens from the Sage Design System. These are maintained by the Sage DS team. This library is for distributing these tokens across multiple platforms.

What are design tokens?

Design Tokens are Design System’s most basic, lowest level element. In atomic design terminology those would be the protons or electrons.

Basically those are key-value records named and organized the same way regardless of the platform (e.g. web, Android, iOS, Figma). They can define various properties, such as colors, paddings, margins, sizes, font sizes, font families, transitions, animations, and others. They represent certain design decisions.

Design tokens purpose is to:

• Release developers from taking design decisions. Often while developing a component, developer needs to take decision what tint of what color should be used. This decision should be taken by designer, not developer.
• Improve handover process and communication between designers and developers. Both, developers and designers are going to use the same token name for given property (color, background color, border, padding, margin, transition and so on). In the end, developers don't need to know what the final value will be.
• Narrow value set to only needed values. Design System uses narrow set of values (spacings, colors, typography properties and others). Those are only values that are needed for visual description of the component.
• Keep visual consistency across all components of the library.

Docs:

• Generating icons

Using the design tokens

Web

To make use of these tokens in your application, import the correct variable definitions based on your styling technology.

Install

To add to a project using npm:

# If you're using npm:
npm install --save @sage/design-tokens

# OR If you're using yarn:
yarn add @sage/design-tokens

You can also add the files directly by downloading from the releases page on Github.

CSS

To make use of the css variables, import them into your code like so:

@import url("@sage/design-tokens/css/light.css");
@import url("@sage/design-tokens/css/dark.css") (prefers-color-scheme: dark);
@import url("@sage/design-tokens/css/components/button.css");

Note: For manual theme switching in JavaScript applications, we recommend using the HTML <link> approach rather than dynamic imports to avoid bundler complexity. You can import the component css files in your JS like below.

import "@sage/design-tokens/css/components/button.css";

<link rel="stylesheet" href="node_modules/@sage/design-tokens/css/light.css" id="app-theme">

<script type="text/javascript">
  function switchTheme(theme) {
    document.getElementById('app-theme').href = 
      `node_modules/@sage/design-tokens/css/${theme}.css`;
  }
  
  function updateTheme() {
    const prefersDark = window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)").matches;
    switchTheme(prefersDark ? "dark" : "light");
  }
  
  // Listen for system preference changes
  window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)")
    .addEventListener("change", updateTheme);

  // Set initial theme on content load
  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", updateTheme);
</script>

SCSS

The SCSS format provides traditional Sass variables while handling mode switching through separate mode files. Due to variable naming conventions, loading both light and dark modes simultaneously would cause conflicts. To address this, dedicated mode files are provided.

Available Files

• Individual component files (e.g., button.scss, container.scss) - Available for granular imports
• The global, light and dark tokens are also exported in their own files for granularity as well

Note: The current SCSS output requires the use of @import statements to ensure variables are properly scoped across files. While @import will be deprecated when Dart Sass 3.0.0 is released, we will endeavor to update our output format to support the modern @use module system before that release.

To suppress deprecation warnings during compilation, add the --silence-deprecation=import flag to your Sass build command.

Light and Dark Mode Support with Granular Imports

Import specific components when you only need certain tokens and create separate CSS files for each mode:

// button-light.scss
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/global.scss";
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/light.scss";
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/components/button.scss";

.button-destructive-primary {
  background-color: $button-destructive-primary-bg-default;

  &:hover {
    background-color: $button-destructive-primary-bg-hover;
  }
}

// button-dark.scss
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/global.scss";
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/dark.scss";
@import "@sage/design-tokens/scss/components/button.scss";

.button-destructive-primary {
  background-color: $button-destructive-primary-bg-default;

  &:hover {
    background-color: $button-destructive-primary-bg-hover;
  }
}

Build process:

sass button-light.scss:button-light.css --no-source-map --silence-deprecation=import

sass button-dark.scss:button-dark.css --no-source-map --silence-deprecation=import

Common JS module

const commonTokens = require("@sage/design-tokens/js/common");
const buttonTokens = commonTokens.button;

element.style.backgroundColor = buttonTokens.buttonDestructivePrimaryBgDefault;

ES6 module

import { button } from "@sage/design-tokens/js/es6";
 
element.style.backgroundColor = button.buttonDestructivePrimaryBgDefault;

A type definition file is also included to work in projects with typescript installed.

Other formats

It is possible to export design tokens to any format or language. If you need to use design tokens in your technology, please contact us and describe your needs.

Contributing

If you would like to help contribute to this library, please read our contributing documentation,

Licence

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use these files except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at Apache 2.0 license.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Copyright (c) 2025 Sage Group Plc. All rights reserved.