Imagine a world where the famous American artist, Andy Warhol stepped into a time machine in 1960 and arrived in the year 2024 where he fell in love with interacting with computers and smartphones.

Andy can’t stay in 2024 for long (rules of the time continuum) so he must return to 1960. However, he wants to recreate the interactive experience he enjoyed using only the analog materials available in The Factory.

He plans to produce this novel art concept at scale so his patrons can buy and interact with the art they own. They use a black-light lamp to simulate dark-mode behavior, see buttons change color on touch, and with the help of simple switches, respond to interactions where different art scrolls in new visuals onto the front of the canvas.

If Warhol wanted to mass produce a mixed-media art piece that looks and feels like a modern web page (without a computer or internet) how would he approach producing it?

This thought experiment examines a Tier 2 level design token naming convention based on CTI+ Taxonomy to imagine a light/dark mode design system. Before we start, a quick review of the three Tiers of tokens and what they mean.

Tokens are commonly split into 3 different levels where each level adds a specific capability to the design system.