[dimal]

Ah, I see. I was working on the web portion of a system that was meant to encompass web, mobile, and smart TV devices, and was very custom. The designers would not have even considered using off-the-shelf Tailwind values, and the mobile teams would not have wanted to translate a web-framework's values into mobile-land. I suppose if you have an organization that's ok with that constraint, that makes it more doable.

> I chalk this up as a design system win more than Tailwind. Any well-defined design system would open up these collaboration benefits. I found Tailwind to be an asset to these both for my own DX and for collaboration with my designer.

Yeah, this seems like the real takeaway. If you have a framework that gives you defaults for the design system, that reduces the friction even more, but I tend to work on very custom stuff where framework defaults won't be appropriate. Are the Tailwind values customizable, so you can use the same Tailwind structure, but have your designers specify their own tokens?

[01brett]

Absolutely. The Tailwind config makes this really powerful to extend or override. You can reuse the same API for things like spacing with your own values/scale or make your own.

The Tailwind docs get into it a bit as you can see here: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/configuration#theme

Here is the spacing section in my config where I've extended the default with interstitial values. What's really cool is these propagate to all the spacing utilities (padding, margin, margin between, etc)

  spacing: {
      0.75: '0.1875rem',
      1.25: '0.3125rem',
      1.75: '0.4375rem',
      2.25: '0.5625rem',
      2.75: '0.6875rem',
      3.25: '0.8125rem',
      4.5: '1.125rem',
      4.75: '1.1875rem',
  }