Thomas Gossmann

Unicyclist. Artist. Developer.

  • Theemo v1.0: Design Tokens from Figma into CSS with @property, light-dark() and Color Functions

    I released Theemo, the end-to-end design token workflow tool, in v1.0. It is capable to convert design tokens into modern CSS using @property, light-dark() and color functions with the help of Style Dictionary.

  • Theemo v1.0: Vite + Ember + Vue + Svelte

    I released Theemo, the end-to-end design token workflow tool, in v1.0. Theming (buiding CSS and packaging themes) as well as integrations with frameworks received a major overhaul.

  • Navigate your Components with aria-voyager

    Building UI components that follow the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) is a time-consuming and challenging task to capture all the many details. Here comes aria-voyager the canoe vessel that navigates your components. You bring your own markup (BYOM) and aria-voyager layers navigation on top.

  • The Design System I Learned the Most From Was Written in … JAVA ?!?

    A story of working with design systems in the web for 15+ years. Starting in a time when NPM didn’t exist, when Javascript didn’t have “classes”, when CoffeeScript was declining, Typescript wasn’t ever thought of and “Design System” wasn’t an existing term … then I learned the most about them.

  • Releasing Second Version of Theemo

    Theemo is an open source Design Token automation suite and consists of a Figma plugin, a Sync toolkit (with integrations to read from Figma and write to Style Dictionary), theme generation and framework adapters to load those to support the entire token pipeline end-to-end. It started as a bunch of scripts and over time they…

  • Inside Design Tokens: The Hidden Knowledge

    Tokens contain a lot of information and even more the relationship between tokens. Making sense of this information is the hidden knowledge living within tokens. Unlocking this knowledge is the next evolution step for design tokens.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Internals

    Tokens not only have a name and a value, they carry on a lot more data, which when given proper meaning is a knowledgeable resource.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Theming

    Theming in Design Systems is a de-facto standard way to exchange the look-and-feel of your product. There is a high divergence of what is a theme? What does it consist of? Which constraints exists when building a theme? When and what to use a theme for?

  • Inside Design Tokens: Naming

    Naming design tokens can sometimes be considered its own discipline. Naming is surprisingly straight forward, and if it isn’t then it solves the wrong problem.