UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · Design Systems and Component Libraries
Building vs Adopting an Existing System
A founder deciding whether to build a fully custom design system or adopt an established one like Material Design faces a genuine tradeoff between speed and differentiation, and making this decision well requires being honest about what a small team can actually sustain.
Adopting an established, publicly available design system, complete with pre-built components, documented patterns, and years of accumulated real-world usability refinement already built in, lets a small team move considerably faster than building an equivalent system entirely from scratch, since the underlying design thinking and extensive usability testing behind an established system like Material Design has already been done by a considerably larger, better-resourced team over a considerably longer period than a small, resource-constrained team could realistically replicate independently.
- Adopting an established design system lets a small team move faster, since extensive design thinking and usability refinement has already been done by a larger, better-resourced team.
- A product built entirely on an unmodified, widely used system can look visually indistinguishable from many others, a real cost worth weighing against the speed and quality benefit.
- A practical middle path adopts an established system's structural and interaction logic while customizing visual tokens on top, achieving distinctiveness without rebuilding proven usability work.
- Building a fully custom design system from scratch is rarely right for an early-stage team, since the scope of research and testing required vastly exceeds what a small team can sustain.