Redesigning Heap Without a Feature Branch

heap.io

2 points·drob··3 comments

Hey! Author here. After talking to folks who have taken on similar projects at their jobs, I realized there wasn't much discussion around how to happily pull off a UI refresh or redesign, and I wanted to share the philosophy we used to make ours a success!

I'm happy to chat and compare notes about how folks have executed similar projects.

I've done some somewhat similar efforts in the past. One thing to point out is that on the something.original.css and something.refreshed.css to avoid code duplication: since y'all were already using LESS as a build process, code duplication shouldn't be a huge problem with LESS importing the original from the refreshed. I found the LESS compiler to be quite good at coalescing complicated overrides of imported base styles to a final, simpler final build output.

Though the last time I did this sort of thing I definitely couldn't have used CSS Variables. That seems like a good solution for modern browsers with or without a compiler like LESS.

That sounds like a reasonable approach! Thanks for the note.

To be honest, we use LESS fairly simply for the things it provides like variables, mixins, and nested selector syntax. We otherwise haven't had a need to make our stylesheets much more sophisticated. So when project planning came around, we didn't ideate much on LESS-based approaches, and I bet we could have and found an ergonomic approach there.

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