AURA Tokens

Design systems often struggle with consistency, scalability, and adaptability, particularly when teams need to switch component libraries or update visual language. Manually updating styles, props, and component attributes across multiple platforms is time-consuming, error-prone, and slows design-to-development workflows.

The key challenge was creating a system that allowed every design atom - fonts, colors, icons, spacing, stroke widths, corner radii, and more - to be centrally defined and automatically applied across components. Styles can be defined today already, but it's often hevaily manual work and can take significant amounts of time to set up.

The system also needed to integrate seamlessly with Figma and code, providing live feedback for designers and engineers while maintaining flexibility for future visual language updates.

AURA was developed as a token-driven design system framework. All design atoms are defined as tokens, which can be updated centrally to automatically propagate changes across component libraries.

Using Tokens Studio and Figma, AURA allows users to instantly see the impact of token changes in an Interactive Token Studio, including the homepage of the AURA site itself. (A sample of AURA's framework is on the homepage of this site, as well.)

This approach reduces manual styling, accelerates library swaps (e.g., MUI to Shadcn), and ensures that all visual updates remain consistent across projects.