Loading…
22
Spent a full week retheming our design tokens and the whole app broke on day one
Last Monday I finally swapped our hardcoded hex values for the new token set my team agreed on back in June, and by lunch the login screen was straight up unreadable. Turned out I mapped the wrong gray to body text, so a dark theme value leaked into the light theme and everything looked muddy. Spent the next four days chasing weird contrast bugs in 30-something components before I found the real problem was just 3 bad aliases. Total mess but honestly the best crash course I have had on how tokens actually flow through a system. Anyone else ever migrate a whole app and eat it on the very first swap?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
riverk827d ago
Did you ever do the thing where you fix the bad alias, everything looks right, and then a week later you find one random button that nobody clicked during testing is still using the old value? That happened to me on a smaller scale with a theme switcher a couple years back. I had maybe 12 components and it still took me three passes to catch every stray color. The worst part was the ones that only broke in dark mode, since I built the whole thing in light mode and just assumed the swap would carry over. It did not carry over. I ended up writing out every token on paper like a weirdo and drawing arrows to where each one got used, which sounds dumb but it finally showed me the two spots where I had aliased a text color to a border color. So yeah, a week of pain for three bad lines sounds about right for how this stuff goes.
7