Thomas Gossmann

Unicyclist. Artist. Developer.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Token Specification

    Design tokens become scalable when they are replicable. A token specification is a formula for achieving design tokens scalability and tools interoperability.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Put your Tokens on a Scale

    Ever worked with a set of design tokens that are super inconsistent and hardly distinguishable? Perhaps a wrong scale? This article explains the available scales, their problems and what to use them for.

  • Inside Design Tokens: The Three Class Token Society

    Design tokens are often grouped based on their phenomenal reference sequence. From basic, over semantic to component tokens. This article compares this organization with a model based architecture and figures out the advantages and disadvantages.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Modeling & Communication

    Design system architecture with focus on design tokens, that form the vocabulary of your visual design language, helping to streamline the communication amongst stakeholders. Modeling the system with boundaries to ensure clear purpose and predictability for design tokens and stability guarantees with fine control for theme authors.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Features

    Features encode user preferences, inherit behavior(s) and are communicated by several principals through agents. Design tokens may or may not support features.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Definitions & Traits

    Over the past three years, I’ve researched design tokens for usage in Theemo and I’m sharing my discoveries in this article series.

  • The Primary / Secondary Naming Controversy in Design Systems

    When researching for my open-source design system hokulea, speaking to designers, or chatting on the design systems slack, it always brings me back to the words primary and secondary. Although I personally don’t like these words, they are kinda like a heavy magnet that draws everybody to use them. The repeated usage of these two…

  • Frontend Component Architecture

    I created this learning resource about the various bits and pieces that are the ingredients to a component architecture. From how they can be used from the outside over how they are working internally to how they can be composed together. I presented this as a talk first at EmberIgnite (an ember mini-conference). Although I…

  • The Hidden Skill and Art of Naming Things

    The two hardest problems in programming are cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one. You learn a lot about algorithms while studying computer science to find clever solutions for the problem at hand – but for naming things? For me undoubtedly this is the hardest problem. In fact, this issue exists in almost every discipline, whether…