Hi everyone, I am trying to figure out if this is a setup issue on my side or a current Figma variables limitation/issue.
I am building a design system using a three level token structure:
Base tokens → Semantic tokens → Component tokens
Where:
Base tokens contain my raw values.
Semantic tokens alias the base tokens for global values.
Component tokens alias the semantic tokens and is what I used for my design library components.
What I expect:
When I update a base token, the change should cascade through semantic and component tokens and be visible directly on the components.
What is happening instead:
When I change a base token, both the semantic tokens AND the component tokens update correctly inside the Variables panel. However, the actual components on the canvas do not visually update.
Here is the before:
Here is after changing the Base token to “red (#ff0000)”:
As you can see, the elements that uses the base and semantic changed but the ones using the component tokens does not reflect the change.
If I check the properties of the ones that uses the component token, the “Fill” references to the correct component token but it uses the OLD VALUE instead of the NEW ONE.
Upon clicking it, it shows the Component Token it is referencing to, and as you can see it is already red there.
So to clarify:
Base token updates ✔
Semantic token updates ✔
Component token updates ✔
Component visuals on canvas ✖
PS. I’ve tried reloading the file after changing the base token to red, and weirdly, it updated only a few elements (see the icons changed to red):
The only way for it to be updated is if I change the Fill to reference a different token and then reselect the correct one. Which is very tedious if we are going to do that to all of the Components in the design library.
Questions:
Has anyone seen components not visually updating even though the variable values themselves change?
Is this related to component properties or instances caching values?
Are there known refresh or sync limitations with variables applied to components recently?
Thanks in advanced for the insight.