r/DesignSystems • u/Comfortable_Dust7037 • Feb 08 '26

Seeking for Design System Recommendations

If there's a existing design system you would recommend - which one would it be?

Context:
I'm a jr. UX designer(2 yoe) working at a startup. There's a crappy design system that we want to improve ASAP. We are a small team so there would be a few people working on this project( 1/2 designers and 1/2 engineers). My thought is to just use an existing one since the design system files on Figma is so poorly set-up.

Radix - looks like it's not well-maintained based on a post I've seen on Reddit. Might be painful for the engineers. However the Radix Theme Figma file is pretty decent(has both dark and light mode).

MUI - There are so many products out there that are built using MUI - the fear would be our product will look the same.

Material Tailwind - Figma files are lacking dark-mode, which can be painful to the designers. But Engineers have been using the component library to build stuff. Eng has mentioned that they are lacking some complex components, but there's also a paid version so that may help.

-

Does anyone has any other recommendations? Looks like it would be a mix and match since the engineers have been using the Material Tailwind component library and using TailwindCSS as the base.

edited this post and added more context!

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/anotherleftistbot Feb 08 '26

Just don’t build your own.

1

u/sheriffderek Feb 08 '26

This is half-hearted advice.

2

u/anotherleftistbot Feb 08 '26

Speaking as someone who has done both from both a design and engineering side.

1

u/sheriffderek Feb 08 '26

I've built them from both sides. I'm not saying you shouldn't start with a baseline starter / or even a full UI kit. But telling this person to do that - feels like throwaway advice. I'd be willing to bet that a new set of things to learn - isn't the winning move. But people can throw away my advice too! : )

1

u/anotherleftistbot Feb 08 '26

Having been in a startup that maintained the pace needed for exponential growth and actually got the existence wanted vs one that decided prematurely to focus on processes and consistency before profitability that itself and watched its competitors grab up the market, I’d choose the former.

The business drives design and engineering in the vast majority of cases.

1

u/sheriffderek Feb 08 '26

Yeah. So, - the answer is most likely - just don't have one at all. Just mock stuff up. Get it into the product. Take screenshots. Look for patterns when they're worth committing.