In today’s fast-paced digital product landscape, companies are expected to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences across multiple platforms and brands—often simultaneously. With ever-increasing complexity in design systems, managing brand identity at scale without sacrificing flexibility or coherence has become a daunting task. This is where the power of Design Tokens and Figma Variables comes into play.
These two tools are revolutionizing the way design and development teams collaborate, making it easier than ever to build scalable, multi-brand design systems that can adapt to changing needs in real time. Let’s explore how combining design tokens with Figma variables can dramatically improve multi-brand scalability and design consistency across ecosystems.
The Problem: Designing for Multiple Brands
Designing for more than one brand poses several challenges:
- Consistency: Maintaining visual alignment across brands while respecting individual brand identities.
- Scalability: Updating one brand without affecting others or creating redundant design files.
- Efficiency: Reducing duplicated effort between design and development teams when adapting components for different brands.
Historically, teams relied on separate files per brand or cumbersome style overrides. This often led to a fragmented system with duplicated components and increased maintenance work. With the evolution of tools like design tokens and Figma variables, these challenges can now be addressed with elegance and precision.
What Are Design Tokens?
Design tokens are platform-agnostic variables that store design decisions such as colors, typography, spacing, and more. Instead of hardcoding values like #007AFF or 16px, tokens use semantic names such as primary-color or base-spacing. These names are linked to values that can change depending on the brand, theme, or platform.
Here’s a simple example of what a design token might look like:
{
"primary-color": {
"value": "#007AFF",
"type": "color"
}
}
By abstracting design decisions, tokens enable better control and enhance reusability. More importantly, they serve as the connective tissue between design tools like Figma and the final code in apps or websites.
Figma Variables: Design Tokens in Practice
With the introduction of Figma Variables, Figma now supports native token-like functionality right inside its design environment. These variables serve as placeholders for values like colors, numbers, or strings and are applicable to layers, components, and design systems.
Designers can now define variables such as:
- Background Color = Brand Primary
- Border Radius = Small
- Font Size = Heading 1
Variables can be grouped and organized into collections—possibly by brand, theme, or component type—making them incredibly versatile for multi-brand projects.
Enabling Multi-Brand Systems
Now that we understand design tokens and Figma variables, let’s focus on combining them to build robust, scalable, multi-brand design systems.
1. Tokenizing Each Brand
The first step is to define tokens for each brand. For instance, Brand A’s primary color might be blue, whereas Brand B’s is green. By creating a semantic token like primary-color, you can assign brand-specific values without duplicating components.
Brand A Tokens: "primary-color": "#007AFF" Brand B Tokens: "primary-color": "#32CD32"
This allows your components to remain consistent in structure but visually adapt to each brand context.
2. Creating Brand Collections in Figma
Using Figma’s variable feature, you can create separate collections for each brand and organize variables by purpose (e.g., color, spacing, typography). Applying these variables to components means that you can switch collections to instantly see the design transform to suit a different brand.
Example Collections:
- Brand A: Colors, Typography, Spacing
- Brand B: Colors, Typography, Spacing
This modularity enhances flexibility without having to maintain multiple versions of the same component.
3. Switchable Modes
Figma supports modes within a variable collection—helpful for creating variants like light and dark themes, or in this case, brand-specific modes. You can structure your variable collections so that switching a mode is equivalent to switching the entire brand identity of your UI.
For example, one “Color” collection can have modes such as “Brand A” and “Brand B”. By simply toggling the mode, all component instances update instantly to reflect different brand styles.
Benefits of This Approach
The synergy of design tokens and Figma variables empowers teams in multiple ways:
1. Reusability Without Redundancy
Designers can build components once and reuse them across brands by simply binding them to semantic variables. There’s no need to duplicate design files or components for each brand variation.
2. Faster Theming and Customization
New brand rollouts become quicker. All that’s needed is a fresh set of variables or token files, rather than rebuilding entire design systems.
3. Improved Collaboration With Developers
Because tokens are platform-agnostic, they can be synchronized with style dictionaries, CSS variables, or design systems on iOS/Android. Everyone speaks the same language—design tokens.
4. Consistency Across Teams
Having a single source of truth improves brand and UI consistency across departments and disciplines. Designers, developers, and stakeholders all refer back to the same system of tokens and variables.
Tooling and Integration
To fully leverage this system, consider the following tools:
- Style Dictionary: Helps convert token values into platform-specific formats (e.g., CSS, SCSS, Android XML).
- Tokens Studio for Figma: A plugin that allows you to sync design tokens directly within Figma and export or integrate with GitHub or CI/CD pipelines.
- Figma Dev Mode: Makes it easier for developers to inspect and use variables defined by designers.
Combining these tools allows designers and developers to stay in sync from the early stages of ideation to production-grade implementation.
Use Cases and Real-world Examples
Imagine you work at a company that manages five product brands, each with unique branding behind a shared set of interface components. Instead of creating five separate design systems, you build one tokenized component library with brand-based variable collections.
When building a new product under Brand C, design time is reduced significantly. The team only needs to add variables to a new Brand C mode. The existing components adapt seamlessly, and developers already know how to handle the related token values in code.
Companies like Salesforce, IBM, and Shopify already use token-based systems to manage complex design ecosystems, demonstrating how scalable and powerful this approach is when extended across teams and platforms.
Final Thoughts
Design is no longer static. It has to be fluid, adaptable, and seamless across multiple brands and experiences. By leveraging design tokens and Figma variables, designers can maintain high standards of consistency and scalability, even as complexity rises.
These tools represent a monumental shift in how we think about design systems. Transitioning to a tokenized and variable-driven environment may take time, but the long-term ROI—in terms of efficiency, clarity, and brand adaptability—is well worth the effort.
By future-proofing your design system today with these methodologies, you’re not just designing for now—you’re designing for every brand and every user your company will ever serve.
