The trigger was a brand refresh. The marketing director walked into a Tuesday standup with a new colour palette, a new display font, and a kind smile. The work to roll that out across our content brand was three weeks: I counted the Figma files (blog hero, quote card, podcast cover, episode card, newsletter banner), multiplied by the designer's day rate, and added a fortnight of "could you regenerate the hero image for these 300 archive posts" that I would have to do by hand.
What we shipped instead took a Saturday afternoon and one paid invoice. Every editorial image format moved into HTML templates. The brand variables landed in a single CSS file. A brand refresh became a five-minute edit, a cache bump, and a deploy. The back catalogue regenerated on next request.
This article is the pattern, with working code in Laravel, the bits I got wrong, and when this is the wrong approach.
What was in the stack
Five image formats. Each one had a Figma file. Each one was opened by a different person across the year and slowly drifted into a slightly different interpretation of the same brand.
