Updated shadcn/ui customization offering

This is a cross-posted blog post, that originally appeared on the Obra Studio blog.

Lately we find that clients have similar needs:

• A recent rebrand needs to find its way into the app UI: The client has gone through a rebranding, and the rebranding now needs to be reflected in a professional user interface
• Design system - Without the politics: The client needs a solid design system but wants to avoid a big project, since they are moving fast
• AI-ready: The client is heavily using AI tools to generate interfaces and help speed up software development projects

Since June last year, we have been maintaining the Obra shadcn/ui kit, which by now has been duplicated over 30,000 times on Figma Community.

Last week we released version 1.4.0, with extended theming options and a CSS export plugin.

Since launching the kit, several clients have asked us to customize our very own shadcn/ui kit. This has led to some fantastic projects where we are able to tune the kit to real-world needs and improve it, while delivering a solid foundation for our clients.

We’ve now turned our offering into a formula:

• Senior designers customize our open-source Obra shadcn/ui kit to your brand
• We create or recreate 10-20 screens into the new kit, in a sprint-based formula, elevating the UX quality and getting rid of poor AI-generated design decisions

The result: a ready-to-go base of a design system in just a few weeks.

There’s a lot of power in this setup to build out software features:

• First of all, you can connect a design system to Figma Make. After applying the rebrand to the kit, product managers and designers can use the look and feel of your design system to generate prototypes.
• An obvious power is that the design system is inherently connected to development by virtue of it being shadcn/ui based. The kit has been built in such a detailed way that, when screens are interpreted by an LLM, they pick out the right Tailwind variables to make designs real.

Many software companies are focused on speed and can’t afford to have month-long discussion about generic components. By going for a shadcn/ui system based, they can move faster. We help them set up the base of their design system in three weeks instead of three months.