Shadcn/ui kit updates

First usage in a client project

We’ve released the shadcn/ui kit in public beta on June 12.

In just a little over 2 months, we’ve had over 6900 duplicates of our kit so far, with this number currently increasing with about 1000 duplicates a week.

We wanted to report on what’s been going on with this kit. We didn’t expect it but it’s become a central point of talk in the studio: designers are excited about it, we use it as a reference for design system work, and it sparks excitement that it’s growing.

For the past 2 weeks, we worked a project where the client found us through the kit.

In this project, we spent some time customizing our very own kit. This project was quite interesting in itself and was the first project that had a flipped structure, where we were presented with a vibe coded prototype as design input (see our blog post on AI has flipped software development).

As such, we are motivated to put more time into updates and improving it.

0.2.0: add-ons retired, all Lucide icons and Tailwind colors directly in kit

The community has spoken: the add-on approach we started with is no bueno. We initially released the public beta with a minimal setup, with just +-20 icons and 3 sets of Tailwind colors (neutral, red and blue). The theory was that people would extend the set if they wanted, but a minimal set was more flexible.

I noticed myself that I kept pulling in those add-ons in every project, and asked the community what they thought about retiring the add-ons. With an overwhelming 6 positives votes and no naysayers, we made the push in the 0.2.0 kit to include the add-ons.

This updated was released yesterday night. You can duplicate the newest version of the kit on Figma community.

Sponsor this project

Open source takes some work: we have to set aside client work to publish work to the community. To help with justifying that time spend, we set up a Github Sponsors page.

The tiers are modelled in such a way that they could benefit other design studios who might want to standardize their internal design system approach.

We are curious where this will lead, for now it's an experiment.

Reminder: we have a documentation website

For everything Obra shadn/ui related, a central home is the separate documentation website.