The Typography Token Trap: Why Your Scripts Break (And What Product Designers Should Learn From It)

If you’ve ever tried integrating typography tokens from Tokens Studio into Figma and found your script reporting “no valid typography tokens found” — you’re not alone. I recently ran into this exact issue while building a plugin to visualize tokens directly inside Figma. The color tokens were parsed and rendered perfectly, but typography tokens? Total failure.

Let’s dig into why that happens, and why it matters more than it might seem at first.

The Core Problem

Tokens Studio does a great job of organizing design tokens in structured JSON. But typography tokens are fundamentally more complex than other token types like color or spacing. A single typography token can contain:

- `fontFamily`
- `fontWeight`
- `fontSize`
- `lineHeight`
- `letterSpacing`
- `paragraphSpacing`
- `fallbacks` (in some cases)

That’s a lot of layers. And most automation scripts, especially older or more generalized ones, just aren’t built to navigate those nested structures.

Instead, they expect something simpler — like:

```json
"color.brand.primary": "#1A1A1A"

But typography.body.regular? That’s an object. With child objects. And it requires logic to reconstruct into a valid Figma style. No wonder the script bailed.

Why It Matters (Even If You’re Not Writing Code)

Here’s the part I care about most as a product designer: this isn’t just a technical bug—it’s a systems design problem.

When tokens can't be interpreted consistently across tools, we lose the very reason we’re using them in the first place: consistency, efficiency, and clarity. A color not rendering is obvious. A font being slightly off might slip through, but the brand voice suffers, the spacing feels off, and the developer handoff becomes a guessing game.

And here's where designers can lean in — you don’t have to write the code to debug the problem. Understanding how tools like Tokens Studio and Figma structure data lets you:

• Predict where friction will occur

• Communicate clearly with developers

• Adjust your system or workflow proactively

AI Doesn’t Magically Solve This (Yet)

While AI can help automate token handling, generate Figma styles, and visualize system data faster, it still depends on accurate parsing and structured alignment. If the foundations don’t match between tools, AI will just fail faster.

That’s what happened in my case. But because I understood what the script was doing, I could pinpoint why it failed—and what would be required to fix it (support for nested token structures and semantic alias resolution).

What Designers Need to Take Away From This

• Design systems are only as useful as their ability to translate cleanly across tools.

• The deeper your understanding of how tokens are structured, the more effective you are—even if you never write a line of JavaScript.

• AI can streamline your workflow, but you still need to understand your pipeline if you want predictable results.

TL;DR

Typography tokens don’t fail because they’re broken—they fail because they’re structured differently than what Figma or basic automation scripts expect. As designers working with design systems and AI tooling, our job isn’t just to design clean UIs—it’s to understand how those UIs are built, translated, and maintained across increasingly automated ecosystems.