OMFG naming things is so hard. I've come to the conclusion that the perfect naming convention for design tokens may actually exist, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out, and certainly not with these deadlines.

I've been managing the product design system at Atolls for just about three years now. On the final stretch before converting to the next iteration of the design system which has many breaking changes, I'd like to take stock of all that I learned while maintaining the production version, including what didn't go well (many things) and what did (there were a few).

Defining clear categories for each part of your design system goes along way to help adoption and maintenance. There are many ways to do this, so here is what worked for me.

Some commands that I keep forgetting and have to look up.

The amateur American Football Club that I play for, the [Northwest Vipers](https://northwestvipers.com), is celebrating its tenth year as a club in 2024 and decided that it was time to change the name and tidy up its brand.

I was brought to [Atolls](https://www.atolls.com/) to scale the newly created design system which was custom made for a subset of its product suite.

Theme deployment and maintenance was drastically improved by moving theme settings to an indepedent repository. Further process automations provided reduced bug and feature request times.

Designing the right environment for the team to be creative, became just as important as being creative myself.

The transition from acquired desktop software to a feature of the [AVEVA](https://www.aveva.com/) cloud offering made branding and unified user experience a high priority.