Powered by Tokens Studio
Esther Cheran
If you’ve ever managed a design system, you’ll know how quickly things unravel when you try to scale across multiple brands, themes, or platforms. Changing a color in one brand means manually updating it across others. Launching a seasonal theme requires duplicating files or hacking together overrides. Even something as simple as maintaining light and dark modes becomes fragile when styles are scattered across tools and codebases.
At the heart of the problem is that design data lives in silos. Variables, styles, and tokens exist inside design tools, but they don’t flow natively into engineering workflows. Developers often recreate them by hand or rely on fragile export scripts. Every handoff becomes a translation exercise, and those translations introduce inconsistencies that multiply with each brand or theme you support.
Design tokens were meant to solve this—providing a single source of truth that both designers and developers could rely on. Tokens Studio’s plugin in Figma has already helped thousands of teams take a step in this direction, giving them more control over theming and token management.
This is why the collaboration between Penpot and Tokens Studio marks such an important milestone. Together, we’ve introduced native, open-standard design tokens into Penpot, making it the first open-source design tool to fully embrace the W3C Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG) specification.
Why this matters
What makes this different from every other “variables” feature is the commitment to open standards. Tokens in Penpot are stored and exchanged using the W3C DTCG spec, which means they can move seamlessly across tools, libraries, and pipelines without being locked into a proprietary ecosystem.
For teams, this unlocks theming and multi-brand support at scale. Instead of duplicating files or patching together overrides, you can now manage tokens as a system: colors, spacing, typography, and more defined once and shared everywhere. Designers and developers finally work with the same source of truth, without endless translation layers.
What shipped
With this release, Penpot users can:
Create and manage token sets directly inside the tool.Combine those sets into themes (light/dark, seasonal, brand variations).Swap themes on the fly, without breaking designs.
The workflow feels natural inside Penpot but connects directly to developer pipelines through open standards. Alongside the implementation, both Penpot and Tokens Studio have invested in documentation, tutorials, and practical guides so teams can adopt tokens confidently, whether they’re new to the concept or already using them in production.
How we got here
The journey has been unfolding for some time. The initial partnership between Penpot and Tokens Studio was announced in 2023, with a vision of making tokens a first-class citizen in design tools. By 2024, sneak peeks and early prototypes were being shared with the community, sparking valuable feedback. And in 2025, native tokens officially landed in Penpot, shaped not only by engineering work but by the open, collaborative approach that both projects are built on.
The impact for teams
The impact is already tangible. Theming goes from being a manual, error-prone process to something systematic and scalable. Pipelines become cleaner because tokens follow a standard developers already understand, reducing translation errors and wasted effort. And because the collaboration itself is open-source, the community can contribute, extend, and evolve the ecosystem together.
For teams running multi-brand or white-label products, this is especially powerful. Entire sets of tokens can be swapped in one action, meaning brand rollouts, theme updates, or accessibility adjustments don’t require endless manual rework.
What’s next
This is just the beginning. The roadmap includes support for more token types like typography, smarter ways to manage visibility and organization, and deeper integration with developer workflows—such as GitHub sync. The long-term ambition is clear: make open-standard tokens the foundation for production-grade design systems, without sacrificing flexibility or openness.
Closing thought
The Penpot × Tokens Studio collaboration sends a strong signal: design systems don’t need to live inside silos or depend on proprietary ecosystems. By combining open standards with an open-source design tool, we’re creating a future where design and code truly speak the same language.
If you’re curious, now is the time to explore Penpot’s native tokens. Try them out, dive into the documentation, and see how this approach can reshape your workflow.
Get in touch with us
For any questions, inquiries or just to say hello.
