# Design tokens

> Design tokens name the roles of your visual identity — background, brand colour, typeface. Why without them a machine can only guess your brand.

Design tokens are the named building blocks of a visual identity. Instead of a colour value sitting somewhere in a stylesheet, it is recorded which **role** that value plays: background, foreground, brand colour, heading typeface.

The difference matters for machines. A person looking at a website sees immediately which green carries the brand. A program sees only a list of values without meaning — unless the roles are explicitly named.

There is a format for publishing them: the draft of the **Design Tokens Community Group** (DTCG). In it, a colour is not a hex string but an object with colour space and components. An agent can read such a file without interpreting the stylesheet.

For perspective: no search service scores these files today. Their value is that a system asked to *represent* a business has a reliable source for colour and type — instead of guessing.

What this looks like in practice — and what a probe across 18 design-system domains found — is in [Why an AI cannot represent your brand](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/machine-readable-brand-design-tokens).

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Source: https://btlabs.dev/en/glossary/design-tokens
Last-Modified: 2026-09-25T15:07:26.033Z
Languages: [de](https://btlabs.dev/llms/de/glossary/design-tokens) · [it](https://btlabs.dev/llms/it/glossary/design-token)
See also: [llms.txt](https://btlabs.dev/llms.txt) · [ai.txt (Policy)](https://btlabs.dev/ai.txt) · [identity.json](https://btlabs.dev/identity.json)