About Terrazzo
Terrazzo is a free, MIT-licensed open-source design tool built by 
It started out as “Cobalt” in 2021 as tooling for the W3C Design Token Community Group (DTCG) format. It was clear early on that a visual token editor was needed, but Drew found the CLI to be as big of a project as he could handle on his own. So along came Nick to design and envision Token Lab in 2024.
The project was renamed to “Terrazzo” to better reflect how lots of colorful little shards of tokens fit together to create a beautiful mosaic when all put together. Also because lots of things are named “Cobalt” (or similar-sounding names like “Cobol”) and it became confusing.
Relationship with W3C Design Tokens Community Group
In 2024, largely because of working on design token tooling, Drew became an editor on the W3C Community Group spec. The Terrazzo project is not an official implementation of the design token format, though adherence to the spec is a goal. Drew participates independently in the development of both.