“I’ve seen this creep in when every screen gets designed in isolation, by different hands, or when the hex value gets eyeballed instead of pulled from a single source. Lock one blue, kill the rest, and make the component library the only place a colour can come from.”
“I have been there. At MoFlo, I inherited internal tools where every screen had a slightly different blue, button radius, and spacing scale because three different people had designed them over two years. I fixed it by freezing the hex values into a tiny shared token file before touching a single component, because once the colors are named, the argument stops being about taste and starts being about the system.”
“I have watched teams ship six different blues because everyone picked their own hex in Figma, and the fix is never the color, it is the decision nobody made about who owns the color. Lock one blue, write down why, then make the wrong choice expensive to repeat.”
“At Garmin, I inherited Connect's color palette with something like seventeen blues floating around, so I locked one hex per semantic role and made engineering treat anything else as a bug. Start with an audit: screenshot every blue, map it to a token like action-primary or surface-pressed, then delete the rest before the next build ships.”
“At Terminus, I watched our robot screens drift into six different blues because every team had its own Sketch file and no shared token set. The fix was never picking the right blue; it was making the single source of blue impossible to ignore.”
“It usually happens when no single source of truth owns color: someone hardcodes a hex in Figma, another in CSS, and a third pulls from an old mockup. At Addifab, I found the same thing: no colors, no typography standards, every page built from scratch. I fixed it by building one brand system in Figma first, then moving the source of truth into code so engineers couldn't drift from it.”
“It happened because nobody owns the color. At Universe we had the same drift until we centralized tokens in one file and made the rule that screens don't pick blues, the system does.”
“That usually means the color wasn't treated as a system decision, so every designer or engineer picked their own blue. At VSDesign I audit screens by pulling every hex into one Figma frame; the shame of seeing twelve blues side by side is what finally gets the team to agree on one.”
“I built Forma at Sunny Health from zero because I knew if we didn't lock color, spacing, and type early, every new screen would drift. At Rally I watched our tooling team ship six different blues before we finally turned the style guide into a shared Figma library and a living dev guide.”