I think digital housekeeping is an unsung hero of digital product design. Right now, I’m in a major website redesign with a constant churn of shifting medical indications, rapidly evolving product specs, and newly dropped patient video content. Lately, I’m finding that maintaining a tidy Figma library feels less like a design task and more like defusing a ticking time bomb. Keeping components clean and pages structured is hard enough when a project is moving at lightspeed, but real chaos starts when someone accidentally references an old screen.
The catch, of course, is that Figma still lacks a robust, built-in version control system that handles deep archival workflows natively. Coming up from the legacy era of Sketch combined with Abstract or Zeplin, I still miss that git-style branching and explicit commit history where you could roll back time with more confidence. Without that safety net baked directly into Figma’s core architecture, keeping track of major milestones and dead-end explorations requires building your own workaround structures from scratch just to keep the team from losing their minds.
Recently, I encountered this issue with a new pharma site: to survive the sheer volume of updates on recent high-stakes builds, I had to implement a completely manual archiving system. That means moving deprecated flows into clearly labeled "GRAVEYARD" pages, locking down master components, and setting up strict protocols.
BUT! A system is only as good as its communication!
Keeping things tidy meant over-communicating with fellow designers and engineers, making sure everyone knew exactly where the active source of truth lived so nobody accidentally picked up an archived file and designed against stale specs. It’s a tedious, high-touch process that relies entirely on human discipline rather than automated software safety rails.
That friction has me seriously considering Figma plugins to bridge the gap and bring some much-needed automation back into the archival pipeline. Until Figma finally builds a native version-control powerhouse that matches what we used to enjoy with Abstract and Zeplin, we are left bridging the gap with custom workflows and third-party tools.
