[braden-lk]

Design-first thinking with tokens is a game-changer for an org building a product that needs to adapt to multiple clients. It's still useful for a singularly-branded product just for separation-of-concerns reasons, but maybe less useful.

Design tokens aren't concerned with implementation. (CSS vars, constants, etc.). Design tokens are an abstraction for standardizing and communicating the values in your design system, regardless of where they show up. Yes, you might implement your design tokens as CSS variables, but not necessarily.