How to deprecate old components in Figma design systems

In Figma, if you delete a component from a shared library, every instance of that component in any designs you’ve used it in will link to the last history point that the component existed.

This is great because your designs are very unlikely to break due to components being removed.

This is terrible because deleted components are completely invisible and really hard to detect in more complex designs.

I offer you today, not a solution… (the tools need to implement proper version management for that), but a strategy that may help ease some of the pain and confusion when deprecating unwanted components.

Note: while this is written for Figma users, a lot of this will be useful for Sketch users also. We’re all friends here.

A real-world example

When first creating Onfido’s design system in Figma, I wanted to try and achieve more flexibility, and give designers more options than our Sketch libraries at the time had support for.

One example was making sure that states (Normal, Hover, Pressed, Focus) for every component were well defined, and easily switchable per-instance.