Is shadcn used by designers too ? And other questions for designers…

[sabadomi]

Hello, i've questions addressed mostly to designers.
I'm struggling a bit about how shadcnui is structured and how (as a designer) i can adopt it and use it for my company's design system.
Is any designer here using shadcnui for the purpose of their company ?
As a designer, we talk a lot about primitive and semantic composition but shadcnui didn't built it like this. Also, shadcnui seems to be perfect for simple project like dashboarding or small website. But for something bigger and complexe, is it still a good idea ?

I'm asking all this questions 'cause i'm facing a shadcn lobbying by developpers in my company. They want us to use shadcn as a single package for all our platforms. We don't have any design system, everything is coded from scratch but the UI design part is well built on Figma. The plateforms already have their identities (two differents styles for strictly differents purposes). Plus, our managers are asking us to not change a lot of stuff in the shadcnui's base code.

Using shadcnui is a real strugle for us, designers, cause it can change everything in our working flow.
I hope some designers have an opinion on it and can clarify or share their experience with it.

[haus23]

Hi sabadomi,

IMHO shadcnui is for you not relevant.

Long read:

Shadcn-ui is a brilliant way to bring in styled components based on radixui-primitives - a library for headless (unstyled) components. And as well for some other components not related to radix-ui. But it is not your design. You have to adopt your design system in the scaffoled components. And it inforces you to use tailwindcss (not that bad ;-) , but i don't know if you are already using tailwind. Would recomment it anyway).

Basically you would have to rewrite every component.

The big pro for shadcn-ui is, that you "earn" the components after installing/adding, so any modification with the styles is yours. No hassle with black-box components.

But: you do have of course to rework your full own sytems on every component.

So I would suggest: just create your own components (perhaps relying on shadcn samples) with your own design system. But for sure use a headless ui library (radix-ui or imho even better react-aria-components).

Hope that might answer some of vour questions.

[sabadomi]

Hello,
Thank you for your feedback. It'll help us a lot.
I will share your though with the devs and the managers. Cause it clarifies a lot of pain points that I already minded.
We already use tailwind, btw, thx :) !

[inuka-mayakaduwa]

I saw this Figma Design File on Figma, and yes, some do use ShadCN for design as well. even i make my wireframe using AI specifically with ShadCN components - https://www.figma.com/community/file/1342715840824755935/shadcn-ui-components-updated-july-24

[sabadomi]

Hi, i saw it too, thank you :)
It turns out that mostly shadcn ui kits (free or paid) are used by developers doing their own designwebsite before developping it.
That's why i'm looking for designers opinion. And i didn't find any until now.
Thx !!