Stop adding tokens. Start expressing modes.
Craft your experience in fewer than three dozen tokens.
Design systems don’t fail because teams lack the tokens they think they need. They fail because intent gets lost in translation.
Mise en Mode
What is Mise en Mode?
Design systems keep growing. More tokens. More variants. More exceptions.
Teams add pricing page tokens. Dark mode tokens. Brand-specific tokens. Before long, you’re maintaining thousands of design decisions with no clear way to scale.
The problem isn’t complexity. It’s how we model it.
Most teams treat every visual variation as a new token to create and maintain. This creates an unsustainable burden: more curation, more documentation, more ways for the experience to drift from consistency.
Mise en Mode introduces a different lens.
Instead of adding tokens for every context, you express how modes affect intent. A button isn’t “critical” or “destructive”. It’s a button in a critical mode. Your pricing tiers aren’t custom exceptions. They’re share the same intentions found elsewhere in your existing experience, expressed with a fresh new style!
What does “Mise en Mode” mean?
Borrowed from mise en abyme, the term mise en mode (Fr. pronunciation: [miz ɑ̃n‿mɔd]) means “placement in mode”: preparing your system not just for use, but for context.
In this approach you can create as many expressions as you want, and nest them infinitely, placing modes inside other modes. This puts less emphasis on your tokens and more on selecting where a new expression should be introduced.
Mise en Mode is about describing experience through intent, in language that both designers and engineers can reason about.
What you’ll learn
- How to support freedom of expression without bloating your token system
- How intents (a more strict semantic token) replace hundreds of component tokens
- How modes shift priority without creating new tokens
- How to reduce system entropy as teams scale
- How to align design and engineering around shared mental models
- How to design for people tomorrow, not just feelings today
Conference talk
Prefer to watch first? This Clarity 2023 talk introduces the core ideas behind Mise en Mode and how the approach can replace hundreds of custom tokens.
Inside the book
This is a conceptual framework book grounded in real design systems challenges. It rebuilds token architecture from first principles, using thought experiments and hypothetical scenarios to demonstrate why intent-based systems scale better than component-based ones.
Part 1: Concept
- Why design systems and creative freedom aren’t opposing forces
- The three tiers of design tokens (and why only one matters)
- Constructing intents with purpose, priority, and properties
- Identifying legitimate outliers vs. unnecessary exceptions
- How modes express context without creating new tokens
Part 2: Develop
- Managing token files across teams
- Delivering tokens to design and engineering
- Authoring tokens that scale with organizational growth
Part 3: Future
- Building inclusive systems that adapt to user needs
- Expression models for multi-brand and multi-context systems
- Where design tokens are headed
Read “Freedom of Expression,” the opening chapter that reframes the relationship between system constraints and creative flexibility.
About the author
Donnie D’Amato is a design systems architect with over 25 years of experience building for the web. He founded Design Systems House and has led design systems efforts for multiple companies as both an embedded team member and strategic consultant.
He challenges the belief that all design systems should be functionally different. His work focuses on discovering ways to customize experiences through a balance of meeting user expectations while questioning traditional design education.
Mise en Mode grew from years of designing, building, and untangling large-scale systems.
What others are saying
I walked away from this book feeling grounded and inspired, and I know I’ll come back to it again. The ideas, writing, and rationale all made me think harder about building systems that actually let creativity breathe while still keeping a structure that’s tight enough to scale. If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of tokens and push your thinking about how they can drive both flexibility and clarity in a system, this is absolutely worth the read.
— ToniAnn Drenckhahn, Senior Manager Design Systems
I’ve been following Donnie’s work for some time now because it consistently challenges my thinking in an area where I have extensive experience, and I’ve implemented parts of his ideas with great success. Mise en Mode pushed me to rethink traditional design system approaches with its emphasis on intent-based design and curated modes. Donnie’s practical, refreshing perspective brings clarity to the complexities teams face in aligning around user expectations. Highly recommended for anyone serious about building scalable, user-centered systems.
— Frank Stallone, Principal UI Engineer
Design systems practitioners of all experience levels will find value in this book. These methods provide a new way to achieve a common goal: improving user experience with systems that influence instead of limit. With Mise en Mode you get both theory and practice, making this a great handbook to build a new system or enhance an established one.
— Katie Langerman, Staff Designer
FAQ
Q: Is this book practical or theoretical?
Both. It’s a conceptual framework meant to change how you architect token systems before you build them. The concepts directly apply to real design systems work.
Q: Is this for beginners?
It’s best suited for design systems practitioners, designers, and engineers who have felt the pain of token bloat, when every new context requires new tokens, and maintenance becomes untenable.
Q: Does it include code or implementation?
Yes. The book uses web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to demonstrate concepts, but avoids specific frameworks or tools. The ideas apply to any token implementation.
Q: Is this about design tokens specifically?
Design tokens are central to the book, but it’s really about how to architect systems that express intent. The focus is on the semantic tier of tokens and how modes affect expression, principles that extend beyond token naming conventions.
Q: Does it cover component libraries?
No. This isn’t about building components or organizing Figma files. It’s about the architectural decisions that make your token system either sustainable or unmaintainable.
Q: What formats are available?
Hard cover print editions are available, and the epub is also now availble at digital booksellers.
Q: How long will it take to ship? The book is produced using print-on-demand, so orders of the book are placed in a queue of other books at various printing locations. This causes the time to delivery to vary based on many factors.
Q: Where does the book currently ship? The links on this page will ship to the US and the UK. For worldwide options, please find a bookseller here.
Join the discussion
Mise en Mode isn’t just a book. It’s an ongoing conversation about how we architect design decisions.
The Discord community is where readers:
- Share how they’re applying intent-based tokens to real systems
- Discuss edge cases and outliers
- Explore how modes work in multi-brand systems
- Get updates on new essays and resources