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Great analogy. I think we’re very much into the phase where we have the fabric and we want libraries to also provide more parts of a suit and just not produce the complete suits at all unless you’re building the product along with it

Are parts of design systems governed by ergonomics and so end up having to be the same? The size of a thumb, a keyboard input, convenience for where nav items are placed. Could you have a half tailored system that has parts that have to be a certain way pre made and leaves the rest to be custom?

That’s a great callout. I don’t think “tailor-made” means that every element needs to be distinct from an off-the-rack option. A tailor-made suit that uses the same fabric as an off-the-rack suit isn’t any less “tailor-made”

Is it time to make a design system called "Fabric"?

I feel like most people will continue to use the defaults unless design thinking also becomes accessible to everyone

Oh interesting. Tell me more. What do you mean by design thinking?

I guess it's like developing a set of skills which give you confidence that you can iterate on something and make it both more personalized and polished instead of feeling like every step you take away from the defaults will always be less polished

Good read — it’s a helpful analogy. Thanks for sharing! This triggers a couple thoughts for me: 1. The DS space is democratizing, and the cost of building a tailor-made system is going way down. But it’s still very expensive to do well. Most teams would be better off with an off-the-rack solution.

True. A caveat I should add to my claim that "tailor-made is better than off-the-rack" is that it assumes you have a good tailor 😄

2. There’s a third category that’s worth mentioning here: DS headless libraries that teams can more fully customize. Radix, Ariakit, React Spectrum, and Ark UI are great examples. IMO those are going to be the engines that drive down DS cost over time.

That's an excellent point. I see headless DS libraries like Radix as the "fabric" of tailor-made design systems, not necessarily in their own category.