The day our entire design system collapsed because of one button color

It was a Tuesday last April, and I got a panic message from our product manager at 9am. Someone on the marketing team had decided to override the primary button color in our design system from blue to green for a landing page. By noon, that green button had spread to 47 different components across 3 projects because our build pipeline didn't have any color tokens locked down. I spent the whole afternoon going through Figma files and CSS files trying to find every instance where green was floating around. The worst part was when I found out the marketing person who made the change had already left for a 2 week vacation. Has anyone else had a single color change completely mess up their system like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

ben_shah935d ago

Did you read that article about how one font change broke an entire e-commerce site?

josephf105d ago

Did they switch to Comic Sans for the checkout button too?

simonreed5d ago

Yeah the font change broke the site... classic. Reminds me of that time someone changed the font size on a menu and the whole layout just collapsed.