[Joker_vD]

> When your brand evolves to a different shade of green

This is such a funny line to read. I just can't help but imagine a brand like a small bulbasaur that evolves into big, strong venosaur which of course involves changing its shade of green.

> An interesting question would be: "how much does it matter that the visual language is consistent across a company's assets?"

An even more interesting question would be "if we keep changing the colours/shapes/general theme/etc. of our brand's logos every nine months or so, do they even matter, really?"

My suspicion is that the answer is "no, not really, that's why we can afford to meddle with them since it's a mostly consequence-free environment, and it distracts busybodies from breaking some actually important aspect of the business".

[seanwilson]

> This is such a funny line to read. I just can't help but imagine a brand like a small bulbasaur that evolves into big, strong venosaur which of course involves changing its shade of green.

Facebook updated their main brand blue and other colors in 2023, partly for accessibility: https://design.facebook.com/stories/redefining-facebooks-bra...

Wise also had a rebranding with accessibility in mind: https://the-brandidentity.com/interview/how-the-ragged-edge-...

Figma recently changed their colors too: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-on-figma-evolving-our-visua...

It won't be just a single color either, but a whole palette for them. It's not practical to do a search/replace of color hexes across all designs and code, because it can depend on context which color is appropriate to use where, especially for accessibility.

It's also the norm I would say for startups and small companies to launch with minimal/good-enough branding (often with poor color contrast for the main brand colors because people love bright colors on white), and then they change/refine it later when it's more important.

Not saying you need design tokens at all stages, but brands do evolve.

[kaelig]

Joke aside, there are truly valid reasons why you'd want to change a single color across dozens of codebases, for what can amount to tens of thousands of occurrences. For example: adjusting link color contrast for accessibility compliance.

Salesforce (where the term "design tokens" was coined) is akin to an operating system for the web, with its own app ecosystem. Developers building Salesforce apps can blend into the Salesforce ecosystem thanks to their design system and design tokens.

And I recommend reading https://m3.material.io/foundations/design-tokens/overview to see how Google allows Android app developers to build incredibly expressive and user-personalizable UIs using design tokens.

[BoorishBears]

Why is Material UI still so comically awful?

M3 is an upgrade but even the "header carousel" component there had me straight up pause and study all the ways it's terrible

From the ripple effect that overflows depending on how wide the text underneath is.

The "back button" which is actually for going from one section to the next

And the way it behaves as I click from section to section using those buttons is "top tier jank" for the lack of a better term

The way it also randomly seems to align or not align the currently selected heading resulting in weird clipping of text that just looks confusing and broken.

The shadow indicating the elevation chance as it goes sticky also looks and feels straight out of Windows 95

Why can't Google just make an aesthetically pleasing UI? It almost feels like Apple and the "modern SaaS template ala WorkOS" guys stole the only two good looking directions for modern UI aesthetics and now Google is stuck pushing along their hideous (but identifiable!) aesthetic along side them.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Fortunately, computers are already really good at finding and replacing strings.

[kaelig]

You can try automating search/replace on hex/hsl/rgb values across all your codebases, but targeting "primary button backgrounds on hover" is only possible with some more advanced tooling in place.

And there's an important runtime aspect when it comes to theming, so it's not just about finding/replacing hardcoded values.

[eviks]

But what you need to replace is semantic strings, which "computers" are really bad at finding, and programmers, thinking it's easy, are really bad at adding