Substrate Design System — Style Dictionary

Style Dictionary is a build tool to generate design tokens across platforms and for use in Figma.

These tokens are part of the Substrate Design System:

Automatically generate separate build files matching categories and components

This config of Style Dictionary generates a 1:1 relationship between build files and token categories.

The use cases:

Each token category as its own Sass partial (_colors.scss)
Separate component files (button.css, input.css, etc)
Tree shaking (only import what you need)

Running the example

First of all, set up the required dependencies running the command npm install in your local CLI environment.

At this point, you can run npm run build. This command will generate the output file in the build folder. Currently the build process exprects style dictionary to be in the same parent directory as the components repository where the stencil components live as they are exported to /components/src/assets/tokens directory.

Exporting for Figma tokens

npm run build-figma-tokens

After this, tokens will be available in the figma-tokens/figma-tokens.json file.

If you use jsonbin.io for your tokens, you can use this script to push tokens:

curl    --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
        --header "secret-key: [your-secret-key-here] " \
        --request PUT \
        --data-binary "@figma-tokens.json" \
        https://api.jsonbin.io/b/[your-bin-id-here]

How does it work

The "build" command processes the JSON files in the tokens folder. The index.js file adds each folder, allowing you to map through them in config.js. The script goes through each folder and generates a file for each folder and populates it with tokens that match the filter.

# tokens/color/base.json
{
   "color": {
       "red": {
            "value": "#FF0000"
        }
   }
}

# tokens/size/base.json
{
   "size": {
       "small": {
            "value": "2px"
        }
   }
}

Because the folder name matches the category, the output would automatically generate separate color and size files.

What to look at

Open the config.js file and see how the script first looks within the tokens directory to map through each folder. The destination then outputs a file that would match the name, and fill that file with the tokens that match the filter criteria.

 files: tokens.map(tokenCategory => ({
          destination: `${tokenCategory}.js`,
          format: "format/js",
          filter: {
            attributes: {
              category: tokenCategory
            }
          }
        }))