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Tokens

Brand new guidance

We strongly encourage our community to follow this guidance. It’s not mandatory yet, but it will become part of the MOD Service Assessments in due time. Questions? Contact your friendly Royal Navy Design System team: design-system@digital.mod.uk.

1Introduction

The Royal Navy Design System provides tokens for colour, typography, spacing and much more. Tokens make it easy to ensure consistency across defence applications. 

2The case for using tokens

The number one reason is consistency: the palette of, for example, danger is the same everywhere. End-users of Royal Navy applications highly benefit from consistency across interfaces, where the colour of danger may save lives. 

Another excellent reason to always use tokens, is that if we tweak, for example, the colours of success, these changes are automatically made wherever it’s in use, in every single live application. Magic. 

3What if you don’t use tokens?

We don’t like you any more. 

Jokes aside, there are some situations where you might need to deviate and overwrite tokens. Do so only if you must, and be aware of any accessibility or readability issues this may cause.

But in 99% of cases: please use the tokens. They’re here to help.

The Royal Navy Design System provides guidance and tools for building high–quality Services within the UK Ministry of Defence. This project is open source and its source code is available on GitHub.

All content is available under the Apache 2.0 licence, except where otherwise stated.

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