30,355 Color Names and the Vocabulary Problem in Design Systems

30,355. That is the current count of unique color names cataloged in David Aerne's open repository, a number the maintainer has compiled from naming references and thousands of user submissions. The repository ships a color picker and a name search tool so designers can pull semantic handles — "parrot," "storm gray," "french porcelain" — for tokens and palettes instead of guessing at hex equivalents.

The figure anchors a fault line Vitaly Friedman identifies in A Practical Guide To Naming Things for Smashing Magazine: the language teams use shapes both thinking and conversation, and inconsistent vocabulary fragments the picture across colors, icons, UI components, features, design tokens, HTML classes, and variables.

What fails when names carry no shared meaning?

A name that is too generic obscures what it actually refers to. A name that is too specific locks the system into one context and leaves little room for reuse. Friedman frames the resulting confusion in plain terms.

The cost is measurable. Erin Gannon's framework treats feature adoption as a five-step funnel: discovery, understanding, trial, learning, and integration into existing workflow. A label that breaks at step one cascades downward.

How do mature design systems structure variables?

Vodafone UK's Design System team published a Variables Taxonomy Map on the Figma Community. It breaks a design token into four collections — brand, primitives, semantics, pages — and extends Nathan Curtis's earlier work on token naming. The result is a lookup table that tells engineers and designers where any token is used and what it represents, directly from the name.

Intuit, parent of Mailchimp, QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint, traveled a parallel path. Designer Nate Baldwin documented the team's pivot from a brand-centric token system to a flexible taxonomy serving multiple product lines. Javier Cuello's naming guidelines cover layers, groups, and components: short, meaningful, structurally logical names that avoid visual properties and remain readable across roles.

Which resources anchor day-to-day practice?

Friedman curates a working set:

• HTML class names: classnames.paulrobertlloyd.com supplies thematically grouped word lists covering behavior, order, grouping, and association.
• Color names: Aerne's repository at github.com/meodai/color-names ships 30,355 entries plus an interactive picker.
• Design tokens: Baldwin's Intuit case study and Romina Kavcic's namedesigntokens.guide walk through token structure with components, categories, states, and roles.
• UI components: Iain Bean's Component Gallery catalogs more than 50 components, from accordion to visually hidden, each with alternate names drawn from other design systems.
• Behavior vocabulary: namethatui.com indexes common UI components and behaviors.
• Product naming: guide.onym.co catalogs brainstorming tools, vetting references, etymologies, and cautionary tales.
• Layers and groups: goodpractices.design publishes concrete do's and don'ts.

Why does naming drive adoption?

Friedman argues the link is direct. "If you see low adoption, it might be merely because of the name," he writes. A label that signals the user's job-to-be-done, mirrors the user's own language, and travels cleanly between designer, developer, product manager, and user reduces friction; one that signals only the internal team produces rejection or ignorance.

He recommends collecting the words users use to describe a feature and letting that vocabulary drive the choice, a discipline consistent with the Nielsen Norman Group's UI copy guidance for buttons and links.

What next for naming practice?

Friedman closes the guide with a working principle: "The right name is the one that's well-understood and used by the team and users." As token taxonomies, public component galleries, and shared vocabulary inventories converge, naming is shifting from individual craft to infrastructure, and the next round of design system releases will publish their full naming schemas, not just their components.