Creating a Design

• Open Adobe XD and create a new file
• Add some Text to the canvas, select the text and add its color and character styles to the document assets.
• Save the file to the Creative Cloud
• Select the publish as a library button and click the publish button in the current file section
• Click the browse tab, then click the done button on the Browse shared libraries
• Go to the Files tab of the Creative Cloud portal and select the Your libraries section
• You should see a card of your file, hover over the card and click the menu icon then select the share option. You should see a modal open and a link being generated. COPY that link.

Using the Design

To use the design we need to import the design file from XD then create a Design System Package (DSP).

CC Lib Link

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/bf505209-e2bf-4af5-6378-307f3338bd14

Importing to VS Code

• Install the Adobe VS Code extension
• Open the extension cmd + opt + x. It may try to locate a DSP, just close the file explorer if it does
• Go to the DSP settings
• Change the Languages so that only SCSS is selected
• Paste the link into the CC LIBRARY LINK field and click import
• Click Save
• Click Start Editing then Finish Editing
• Use your terminal apply changes to the Theme component: yarn run presetup

Updating the DSP

• Go to the DSP settings
• Click the Re-import button of CC LIBRARY LINK field
• Click Save
• Click Start Editing then Finish Editing
• Use your terminal apply changes to the Theme component yarn run presetup

Design Tokens

The DSP makes use of reference and contextual tokens. Reference tokens are hard values taken from import of the XD file. The contextual tokens are custom to the DSP and use the reference tokens as a value. This methodology has been directly inspired from material design.

Example

owl.ref.palette.dark is used as the value for owl.sys.color.on.light and owl.sys.bg.dark.

This approach allows the developer to be concerned with only having to implement the appropriate context to element styling and leaves the designer free to make changes to references without having to worry about breaking code.