PSA: My Figma component library broke after 150+ pages

Spent about 3 months building out this component library for a client's website redesign. Started clean but somewhere around page 80 I kept overriding local styles without realizing it. By the time we hit 150 pages every button had 4 different color variations and nothing matched. Had to go back and audit each page individually, which took another two weeks. Anyone else run into component bloat on bigger projects?

2 comments

2 Comments

mitchell.shane13d ago

Oh man, that style drift is brutal. I once spent four months building a pattern library for a furniture catalog and what killed me was the button padding. Every time I thought I'd standardized it, some eager developer would decide 16px felt too tight and bump it to 18. We ended up with 37 different button variations across 200 pages. Two of them only appeared on a single page each.

taylor_moore13d ago

I just read something from a UX researcher who said "style drift is like death by a thousand cuts" and man that hits hard with your story. The way you described 37 button variations really got me because I heard someone say the worst part is you never notice it happening until you're way too deep. That padding thing you mentioned is exactly what I keep reading about where design systems fall apart from tiny little changes nobody thinks matter. Those two buttons on single pages must have been a nightmare to hunt down.