Level

A part of a token name meant to represent some important concept within an organization’s presentational ecosystem.

Example

color.red.500

In the example above, each word between the . delimiter is a level.

• The first level (color) tells the reader that this token is meant to represent a color value.
• The second level (red) tells the reader which color, specifically some shade of red.
• The third level (500) tells the reader that this is part of a scale of several tokens. In this case, this value is within a scale of hundreds.

Tokens primarily should have a minimum of two levels, one of which relating to a stylistic property. Depending on the tier, the property could be describing the value set (ie., primitive), or which property of an element should be affected by the token (ie., semantic or component).

Other levels will further classify which concepts a token is aiming to support. There is no limit to the number of levels a token schema could support. However the more levels, the more suspectible a system is to token bloat.