Designer Cake

From my hazy cold-infected head, this morning I spurted out what (seems) a rather clever analogy for a common design dilemma. I'm calling it the "go ahead and bake the cake" problem.

A designer is given copy and elements for a project. They work up the project and then suddenly drastic changes occur to the copy or concept.

The metaphorical cake has been baked. The only way to change the batter is to start over.

Sometimes you can't avoid it. Things come to light at the last minute. But sometimes it's just too easily assumed that one thing can be swapped out with another. If it's scraping off the vanilla icing and putting on strawberry, sure. But if it's replacing the eggs with a vegan substitute, that's different.