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Rant: 214 individual button styles in one file
I was cleaning out our shared Sketch library last Tuesday and counted them. 214. That's 214 separate button symbols, all for a product with three core actions. Someone made a new one every time they needed a different margin, and nobody ever deleted the old ones. We have 4 primary blues that look identical to me, and I spent an hour trying to figure out which one was the 'current' one from our old style guide. It made me wonder how many hours went into maintaining that mess instead of building features. Has anyone else hit a crazy component count like this and actually got the team to agree on a cleanup plan?
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theabennett1d ago
Start by agreeing that cleanup only works if you also change how new buttons get made. Otherwise you delete 214 down to 20 and six months later you are back at 150. What finally helped on our team was making the main button a real coded component, so a designer who needed a new margin had to ask an engineer instead of just duplicating a symbol. That friction felt annoying at first but it killed the habit fast. Pair that with a rule that any new style has to replace an old one, not sit beside it, and the count stops creeping up.
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