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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

As I get older, I have grown to really distrust any technological choice of having a "single source of truth" and "Cross-Disciplinary" concerns.

Having a tool reconcile data across sources makes sense. Having a single source, sadly, does not. Especially not when you are forcing stakeholders/users to either use a new tool for this, or worse, to change their vocabulary and tooling to support it.

So, I get the desire. It would be nice to have a way to say "this color red is always used for whatever reason." But then you will have people try and layer that on with "for other reasons, things of another type will always be darker by about 4 shades." Someone will see one of these interactions go poorly, and add whatever emphasis they can to the rule they care about. Then the obfuscations begin.

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You're right in that the "centralized single source of truth" actually rarely is a thing at scale.

It's common to adopt a mixed approach: some design tokens make sense to centralize (like global brand colors), and others are local, such as tokens for a specific product or sub-brand.

For example, a web app can build its own token architecture based on an existing foundation shared with iOS and Android apps. They share _some_ concerns, but technical implementations differ they may offer different theming features, too.

What is the alternative? "Having a tool reconcile data across sources " ? Is that more or less hard?

Most realistically, the main alternative will be processes focused on product release. With a statistical acceptance of mistakes. Consider that Coke has a specific shade that they have used for a long time.

My main problems with efforts like this is that they cannot distinguish between different organizational priorities on design considerations and they make virtually no allowance for what different practitioners are using today.

That later point is the one that drives me the most crazy. We have very few tools that can help reconcile a graphic design to a website. Most of what we have are attempts to change how graphic designs are created so that they can be more directly transferred.

> processes focused on product release

+10000

As I mentioned in a couple of my other messages, beware of people over-systematizing and over-centralizing, as it can come at the cost of delivery efficiency and defeats the point of operationalizing design. Plus, it creates a growing maintenance burden on the team maintaining that single source of truth.

> beware of people over-systematizing and over-centralizing, as it can come at the cost of delivery efficiency and defeats the point of operationalizing design

Yes but also be aware of systems (or lack of) that people deliver crap fast (which is only better than delivering crap slowly).

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