On tokens and the impossible

Two things at sipgate were, for years, officially impossible. One was using our brand font, PX Grotesk, in the web app — too costly, too fiddly. The other was dark mode. Both got the same verdict from people I respected: nice idea, won’t happen.

Both shipped. Not because we finally tried hard enough, but because we changed what kind of problem they were.

What changed was design tokens. Once color, type and spacing lived as named, semantic decisions in one place — and fed every platform from a single source — dark mode stopped being a feature and became a side effect. We weren’t restyling the app; we were swapping one set of token values for another. When Neo Design and Dark Mode went live for every customer, the striking thing was how unremarkable it felt. A theme, flipped.

This is what I most want people to take from the work: the impressive deliverable is rarely the hard part. Dark mode is the demo. The architecture that turns “redesign everything” into “change these values” is the actual achievement, and it’s invisible in the screenshot.

So when something gets called impossible, I’ve learned to distrust the word. Usually it isn’t impossible — it’s just expensive in the current structure. Change the structure, and the impossible quietly turns into a Tuesday.