variables seems to be super nice but what i am missing is that if i make a colour alias to a specific collection - i can’t set the opacity separately (e.g. colour 50 with 20% opacity)
So basically i want the colouyr to be from another collection and i want to set the alpha seperatly (controlled as rgba - since i dont need it as opacity)
I’m a little disappointed that there are no such options. The first thing I hoped for when I heard “variables” was just such parameterization. It would have made the management of variable styles much easier.
Yeap… tokens is a part of variables that is not complete yet.
We are waiting a speed deployment of all call to variables because we need them for opacities, gradients, shadows… I can’t really start working for my clients
[BETA] are cool but [USERS] always want more
+1
This is what exactly I am trying to find in the variables. @bart13 Thanks for sharing your idea. This is really super important for the design systems.
There should be an additional option to set the opacity to that alias variables.
Dear Figma, I absolutely love what you’re doing with Dev Mode, Local Variables and I honestly cannot stop being amazed by the things coming out as of late. Please please please, if there’s one thing that would magically transform our dev workflow is to support either HEXA or RGBA or some way to incorporate the alpha channel as part of the the color definition when we define a color variable.
We do a lot of mobile development and it would make life so much easier if the transparency/alpha values came with the colors in the palette vs. having to define them and keep track of them elsewhere.
I have kind of a workarround - its not the its not the best - but it works (with paid token studio version)
you manage your tokens via token studio
Then you export the tokens via token studio to variables (do not start to edit tokens in variables! - management is done in token studio)
Now everything which is linked - remains linked in variables but as soon as its a RGBA value - its not a linked value in variables anymore but its a hex with opacity. This is completly fine since you manage your tokens in token studio and the logic of assining tokens happens there. You only assign the variables on Figma layers to get the best designer experience when changing themes
It might help you moving forward for now - but this is still a desired feature.
Yeah, thanks for the detailed workaround. In Semrush we use exactly the same workaround Hoping some time in the future Figma will upgrade its native tokens so we would not need such workarounds at all.
+1 for wanting to be able to manipulate alpha transparency independently on aliased color variables.
My immediate use case is for establishing state variants for various semantic application colors (e.g., disabled items are transparent) that still reference our core color primitives.
The goal is to be able to set transparency at the semantic color definition level (rather than manually at the layer level) without having to either unlink each color from its respective primitive or, alternatively, maintaining entirely separate primitive color scales for each potential transparency level of ever single color within our primitives collection.
Growing a design system at our company and missing this feature badly right now as we do not want to use workarounds or third party plugins for maintaining variables.
Hoping some time in the future Figma will upgrade its native tokens so we would not need such workarounds at all.