Naming Design Systems

Your instructor: Samantha Gordashko
Tickets: Get a ticket ↓

Workshop includes:

🔖 Examples to take away
🗣 Interactive sessions
📺 Workshop recordings
🎤 Dedicated Q&A time
🏅 Smashing Certificate

Workshop, 5×2h + Q&A • Mon & Wed, Apr 20–May 4 2026
9:00 – 11:30 AM PT • 18:00 – 20:30 CET • Check your time zone ⏰

“We need naming conventions that work in code, make sense in Figma, AND help marketing find the right brand assets. Oh, and engineers keep asking why we called it action-passive-subtle-active because nobody knows what that means.” Sound familiar?

In this naming workshop, you’ll not only learn how to think strategically about naming in your design system, but also gain practical skills to document and maintain naming decisions that actually make sense to everyone.

Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

Interactive live sessions

5 × 2h live sessions

Practical insights

From naming design tokens to creating naming conventions

Hands-on exercises

With reviews by your teacher

Life-time access

To all video recordings and examples

Dedicated Q&A time

To ask all your questions

Smashing Certificate

A well-deserved reward for your work

$350^.00 $450^.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. Apr 20–May 4.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

🎪 Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.

“We need naming conventions that work in code, make sense in Figma, AND help marketing find the right brand assets.”

Sound familiar? Naming in design systems has become one of those problems everyone acknowledges but nobody knows how to solve. We poll ten people on what a token name means, and we get ten different guesses. We inherit systems where tokens like action-passive-subtle-active exist, and nobody—not even the person who created it—can explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how of that decision.

The result? Designers can’t find the right tokens. Engineers question every naming choice in code reviews. Marketing gives up and just asks “what’s the hex code?” And the person maintaining the system spends more time explaining names than building components.

This workshop teaches you how to build a naming system, not just name things. You’ll learn proven approaches to organizing naming decisions that scale with your organization, whether you’re a team of one or supporting multiple brands, products, and platforms.

Gain practical skills to build naming systems that work for designers, developers, AND non-technical team members; with documentation workflows that keep everything aligned as your system grows.

What You Will Learn

The workshop focuses on practical skills you can apply immediately.

Working in small, collaborative groups, you’ll learn how to transform the chaos of naming decisions into a systematic workflow that your whole team can understand and use. Through hands-on exercises and real-world scenarios, you’ll practice naming components, design tokens, and design properties using approaches that bridge the gap between design and development.

Think of names as coordinates that map to the design decisions within your system. When naming is done well, designers, developers, product managers, and even LLMs can locate exactly what they need without a guided tour.

You will gain practical skills to create future-friendly naming systems:

The fundamentals of systems thinking as it applies to naming in design systems.
What makes a great token and component name; technically accurate, aligned with code, and designer-friendly.
Transform component anatomy into clear, consistent names that align design tools with code.
Use visual mapping techniques to plan, document, and communicate naming decisions.
Create design token naming templates following a three-tier token structure that works for technical and non-technical team members.
Choose semantic names for scales, emphasis, hierarchy, and conditional states tailored to your organization’s needs.
Build a systematic workflow for documenting naming decisions outside design tools so they can be shared and collaborated with cross-functional team members, developers, and LLMs.
Learn LLM-assisted workflows to speed up naming decisions and maintain consistency.
Document naming patterns, conventions, and architecture decisions as you go, not as an afterthought.
Practice giving and receiving feedback and presenting ideas in a safe space.

By the end of the workshop, you will have naming templates and documentation workflows you can bring back to your team, along with the systems thinking skills to adapt them as your design system evolves.

Why You Should Attend

Naming is hard. But it doesn’t have to be.

The problem isn’t that designers are bad at naming. The problem is that nobody can agree on common language—and without a system for making and documenting naming decisions, every choice feels like starting from scratch.

Today’s systems designers are facing challenges like:

“How do we name components so designers can find them in Figma AND engineers can reference them in code?”
“What’s the difference between ‘simple,’ ‘sophisticated,’ ‘compound,’ and ‘composed’ components, and does my team even use those terms?”
“How do we create token names that explain themselves without becoming impossibly long?”
“Where do we document all these naming decisions so the next person doesn’t have to reverse-engineer our choices?”

If you’re wrestling with questions like these, you’re not alone. Many designers jump straight into naming tokens or components without establishing patterns first. This leads to inconsistent conventions that confuse team members and require constant explanation.

Building these foundations now pays off in a big way down the line. Instead of explaining the same naming decisions over and over, you’ll have documentation that speaks for itself—for humans and LLMs alike.

Who Should Attend

This workshop is ideal for anyone who’s ever stared at a token name and thought “what does this even mean?”

Designers wanting to understand how to name components and tokens so cross-functional team members can actually find and use them.
People working in Design Systems who want consistent naming conventions without endless debates.
Agency, freelance, or in-house designers who need naming systems that work across multiple clients, brands, or products.
Product designers ready to level up their system design skills to better collaborate with engineering teams.
Anyone working with LLMs who wants to create naming documentation that AI tools can actually use effectively.

Experience with design tools like Figma is helpful but not required. We’ll be using visual mapping techniques that work for any design tool or platform.

If you have specific workflow or tool requests, let Sam know, and she will try to accommodate them!

A basic understanding of design tokens, design systems, and how components are built in code will help you get the most out of this workshop.

What hardware/software do you need?

A free Figma account to use FigJam to participate in group activities.
Access to Zoom to attend the live workshop sessions.
Access to Smashing’s Slack to ask questions during live workshop sessions.
Access to Google Docs where workshop links are stored.

Optional Tools Demonstrated by Sam: - Paid Figma account to use Variables and Modes - Spreadsheet tool (Airtable is shown, but Excel or Sheets will work) - Free GPT or Claude account to explore LLM-assisted naming workflows

About Sam

Sam is a Freelance Design Systems pro with a Design Tokens obsession.

You might recognize her under the alias of Sam I am Designs, where she’s well known in the design systems industry for making people laugh while she shares pro tips, workflows, and epic fails as a public speaker, host of design systems events, and educational content creator focused on Systems Thinking and Design Tokens.

These days, Sam works with larger organizations that are scaling their design system, but she’s spent most of her career as a “Design Team of One” at various tech innovation startups, working on everything from design tokens tools for designers to life-or-death design to genetic testing for psychedelic-assisted therapy. This range of experience has given her a unique perspective on ways of working in small teams to build big things while helping stakeholders appreciate the value of design processes.

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over five days. Our virtual doors open at 8:45, we start at 9 AM PT.

The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

Mon, April 20, 9:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
Wed, April 22, 9:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
Mon, April 27, 9:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
Wed, April 29, 9:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
Mon, May 4, 9:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)

$350^.00 $450^.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. Apr 20–May 4.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

🎪 Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.