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Comment by masonhensley | Hacker News Reader

What's your general thought on adapting one of the bigger design systems with thousands of hours of improvement & polishing vs building one from scratch?

I do think there is need for a common vernacular in these components, however I think that too often teams start from scratch when they could pull something off the shelf, and swap out some colors.

List of corporate sponsored design systems: https://designsystemsrepo.com/design-systems/

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At some point you’re fighting against the design system more than you’re using it. It’s The same reason that I wouldn’t build a web app on WordPress. WP is great if what you want is a WordPress site. Otherwise, you’re just trying to shoe horn _your app_ into WordPress. Most of these things aren’t difficult to build and can be picked up a la carte and customized to whatever extent.

The depth & flexibility in many of these libraries is quite extraordinary.

Totally agree with the Wordpress example, however, I'd argue that more products & applications should attempt to be build upon known primitives to reduce cognitive overload for both the building team and the end users.

Agree with this comment. I think it is awesome that OP worked on a design system for the first time, that’s great experience to have, but it doesn’t warrant further diluting the market with another unfinished system.

It's not a design system. It's documentation/best practices around common UI components that you'd find in most design systems.

Oh, then I guess I don’t see the point? Actual design systems vary quite a bit, refer to their documentation for their exact flavor of how to implement UI correctly and eliminate the middleman. I’m not saying having a general knowledge of the underlying tools is bad, that’s great knowledge to have, but it does already exist if you look for it.

If I had to guess, the point is that OP enjoys learning about design systems and is trying to create a resource for other people to also learn from. Tons of knowledge already exists, but that doesn't stop people from trying to create or share new approaches to it anyway.

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