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Tokenpedia Defining terms for design tokens

Curator

A person or team responsible for making decisions about a token system. Curation involves choosing which values to assign to tokens and maintaining those assignments over time.

Curatorial responsibility tends to be distributed across tiers:

  • Primitive curators select values that represent the brand — colors, typefaces, spacing, and other raw design decisions. This role is typically held by brand or visual design teams.
  • Semantic curators map those primitive values to interface concepts, deciding which token should reference which. This role is typically held by design system teams.
  • Component curators assign values to component-specific tokens and are usually the owners of those components.

Note

The terms choice and option describe the action a curator takes at each tier: choosing a semantic value, or selecting from a set of primitive options.