Design Loops and Time Travel, Ep. 6: Back to the Figma
- Alex Dihel
- Aug 13
- 1 min read
In Back to the Future, the DeLorean doesn’t just take Marty to the past - it lets him fix the future.
Design has one of those too. It’s called “version history.”
One minute, everything’s fine.
Next, a layout breaks, a user journey collapses, or a stakeholder says, “Didn’t this screen use to... make sense?”
That’s when you hop into your file history, race back three weeks, and find the moment where it all went off the rails - probably around the time someone renamed the main component “final_final_FIX_v2_actually_final”.
Sometimes, going forward means going backward - not to undo, but to remember.
Because the past isn’t gone.
It’s documented.
(Yes - this is secretly a design documentation importance post.)
And occasionally, the thing you needed was waiting patiently in V4, hoping you'd return.
What Back to the Future teaches about design timelines:
🕰️ Version history isn’t just for emergencies - it’s for perspective
🎞️ That one discarded idea might’ve aged into the right one
📚 Context makes a comeback when you stop treating files like a graveyard
🚗 Speed is great - but check your flux capacitor before you go too far
