When aliasing a color variable to another (img 1), or using it directly on an element (img 2), we should be able to override the opacity without the need to create a variable for each transparency variation:
Hey All, thanks for your patience here and for keeping this thread going!
To be transparent about where this stands, this request has been passed to the Variables team, and it's come up through multiple channels beyond this thread. While the team has been clear internally that they think this should exist,the holdup has been engineering capacity and some real design questions about how an alpha-modified alias should behave consistently across the product and translate cleanly to code, which is what @jjcm was digging into earlier in this thread.
I don’t have an exact timeline to share, but what I can tell you is that it's actively being worked on rather than parked. I'll come back to this thread with an update when there's something concrete to share. In the meantime, thanks to @Variables Plus and @Ebuka.I for sharing plugin approaches, and to everyone who's documented their token setups here that detail is genuinely what gets used when the team scopes this!
Nice work! It, however, doesn’t seem to take into account appearance? I know I can probably just freely type this into the opacity segment today but I didn’t want to change that just yet as the codified components rely on that opacity token currently.
Root:
Ext. collection:
Notice it’s “blind” to any branding until unlinking. It also works if I set brand appearance directly onto the component, but removing it again (Cmd + Z) returns it to the broken state.
Edit: It fixed itself after flipping through branding color appearances in an ancestor layer to “refresh” the stale value I guess. Leaving this here anyway in case it’s isolated to this new feature.
Thanks for the update but with all due respect, I don’t think this solution is the right approach. It’s definitely a step forward but we still need it in the properties panel. Please don’t call it a day and mark this topic “solved”. I’m prepared to die defending this hill.
I still can’t find a straightforward solution to this. Even simpler tools like Adobe XD were able to achieve opacity without breaking the link to colour assets.
