The old site had one hundred and forty separate gradients in its stylesheet. We counted. Not one of them was telling a user anything they could not have worked out from a colour and a label.
Moving a whole file every time somebody nudges a slide is the kind of thing that seems fine until your customers start opening large files. Here is what we changed, and what it cost us to change it.
We shipped the responsive rebuild in eleven weeks, and then spent the next eleven months finding places it had not reached. The rebuild was the easy half.
Three years ago we spent eleven weeks drawing a canvas satchel for a menu bar icon. This year we replaced it with a circle and a line. Both decisions were correct at the time, which is the uncomfortable part.
Removing decoration removes code. No bevels, no inner shadows, no nine-slice images for buttons that could have been a border. The whole design system is now four colours and one typeface at three weights.
We passed four million accounts in December with fewer engineers than we had in 2011. Everything below is what we would tell a friend starting a company this year, minus the parts that were luck.