Keeping design alive through a 2-month internet shutdown
I led the effort to keep Snapp’s design team working when the internet went dark — and proved design holds up when everything else breaks.
A design-ops case study — included to show range. For interface and visual craft, see my other work.
Show: a simple timeline — Feb (prep) → March–April (shutdown). Why: the whole arc in two seconds.
Owned the workflow end-to-end — design, implementation, QA, and keeping every team aligned
Prep Feb 2026 → Shutdown March–April 2026
Design System · SRE & Cloud · Design Chapter · Product & Dev
The core problem
- A full internet shutdown was coming
- Figma and every cloud tool would stop working
- Last time, design got bypassed: features shipped straight from PM → Developer, some “designed” with rough hand sketches, many with no design at all
Two goals
Keep older designs safe
As living documentation the whole company could rely on.
Empower designers to keep designing
Even with no outside internet.
Show: 3 icons — Auto-backup · Internal design tool · Download panel. Why: makes the plan glanceable.
Challenge → Solution
Figma won’t work without internet
Tested Sketch, XD, and Penpot — chose Penpot because it:
- Runs on our own servers (no outside internet)
- Supports live collaboration, like Figma
- Logs in with our company account
- Feels familiar — close to Figma
Offline Figma wasn’t an option (no org plan, no budget), and PDFs alone couldn’t support real design work.
Show: Sketch / XD / Penpot × offline · collab · login · familiar UX, with check marks. Why: the decision was tested, not guessed.
9 years of work could be lost — 250 projects, 9,000+ pages
Converting it all failed (slow, broke layouts). With the team, we decided to:
- Keep old work as PNG references — mainly documentation
- Design new things in Penpot
- Rebuild only the design system — with the Design System team
I asked Product & Dev which flows mattered most, so we protected the right ones first.
We didn’t know when the shutdown would hit
Drove the build of automatic daily backups:
- Started with zero knowledge of the cloud stack
- Learned it with AI, partnered closely with SRE & Cloud
- Only changed files get saved each day
Show: Figma → daily “changed?” check → parallel workers → internal storage. Why: the heart of the case study — makes a technical system readable to anyone.
Impact
layoffs in the design team
logins on Penpot
new files created
backups downloaded
Launched several real features in Penpot during the outage. Also helped other Snapp ventures, like SnappBox.
Optional: a supporting screenshot of the download panel or Penpot in use. Why: reviewers scan for proof alongside numbers.
Trade-offs I accepted
- Every other migration path failed — and we were out of time
- “Something over nothing”: a working, imperfect system beat a perfect plan that never shipped
- PNG references aren’t editable — a real cost, but the right call for documentation
- I validated this trade-off with the Director of Design before committing
What I'd do differently
On tooling
- AI moves fast — today I’d run the backups with agents and MCP
- And tomorrow there will likely be something better again
On process
- Under heavy time pressure, going mostly solo kept me fast
- Next time I’d involve teammates earlier, so the work doesn’t lean on me alone
Questions you might be asking
What I took away
I now treat AI as a teammate.
I went from “I don’t know any of this” to leading a full continuity system in an unfamiliar stack — by pairing design + AI with the right teams. It lets me take on problems I’d once have called “not my job,” and bring more possibilities back to the people around me.
Show: a photo of you or the team. Why: ends on a human note.