primitives VS antd

Fast forward to a week ago, I cloned the Reach UI and Radix UI codebase and started exploring. Large codebases are always difficult to comprehend. With some digging around and reverse engineering, I was able to create the first component listed in the Reach UI docs, the Accordion.

Hi HN! I'm Vlad, a designer and engineer on the Radix team (https://radix-ui.com). We just launched Radix Themes, an open source component library for building modern, accessible React apps.

Radix Themes is built on top of Radix Primitives (https://radix-ui.com/primitives), which companies like Vercel, CodeSandbox, and Supabase, among others, already use to power their interfaces.

Our goal is to help you focus on your product and build it faster instead of re-inventing common designs and working on the UI components over and over.

Under the hood, Radix Themes is built with TypeScript, React and vanilla CSS. All design tokens are CSS variables that you can tweak, overwrite, or use to build your own custom components with any styling solution that you like.

The idea to build Radix Themes emerged while working on our own design system at WorkOS (https://workos.com), which is the company behind Radix. There was hundreds of design details and edge cases that we had to take care of, so it still didn't feel like a solved problem.

We also were obsessed with getting the developer experience right. For every component we asked ourselves—what is the right API? What are the right props and parts? What should, and more importantly, shouldn’t be a part of this component? What API would make the code easy to understand and maintain, and what would put you into a messy situation that could bite when you don’t expect it?

With this approach, we used our own, battle-tested components that serve our paying users to kickstart Radix Themes.

I hope that you find Radix Themes useful. Right now, there’s 45 components, hundreds of carefully crafted variants, a few simple and powerful primitives for layout, and an extensive token system.

I would love to hear your feedback on our work and learn about your experiences with building UIs.

Other things that led me to choose this path were: Most libraries that are ports, official or not, use the original name (e.g. Svelte Material UI); Radix UI's license is fairly permissive (https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/main/LICENSE), which is why I also don't think it matters that it's a company behind it. Same as why I don't see an issue with the name Preact, for example.

For a react project I recommend https://radix-ui.com, it's got pretty good defaults

radix-ui.com

This is really cool, Radix UI uses a similar hook internally for their components. I like your implementation though.

Remix is a dream. Once combined with Radix Form Component it'll be freaking heaven. https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/form-rfc/rfcs/2023-radix-form-primitive.md

Looks like radix-ui.com, but a bit more boring tbh

Ant Design

Official Website: https://ant.design/

Ant Design (antd) is a React component library for building beautiful and modern user interfaces. It comes with a collection of prebuilt, enterprise-level UI components. To install Ant Design, use the command below:

🔍 Site ⭐ GitHub

(I'm a frontend dev, but I came into the design side only later in my career, after having started as a full-stack programmer.)

I think this book is probably the single best resource I've seen on the topic: https://www.refactoringui.com/

It's a really easy-to-use format (one quick tip on each page, with clear examples).

It's from the people who made Tailwind, a CSS framework that's basically a reimagining of Bootcamp for the Javascript/component era.

Check out some of their templates: https://tailwindui.com/templates

These are lookalike "modern" designs that you can pay to use, or just draw inspiration from. Imitation == flattery and all that.

Along similar lines, check out the free Next.js templates: https://vercel.com/templates/next.js

If you want to build up from components instead, Tailwind offers a component library too: https://tailwindui.com/components

For React, I prefer the astoundingly good MUI framework (amazing components with lots of customizability, a good enough default look, and great documentation): https://mui.com/ If you end up going this route, using their Figma kit (https://mui.com/store/items/figma-react/) plus the Refactoring UI book from above should allow you to whip up a pretty standard-looking, "pretty enough" design in very little time. And then implementing it using the actual MUI lib would just take a few days.

There's also Ant Design: https://ant.design/

And Chakra UI: https://chakra-ui.com/

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For more theoretical stuff (i.e., less visual but still very valuable), the UX research group Nielsen Norman still has a treasure trove of valuable advice: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-guidelines-for-home...

You should know the basics of accessibility (beyond general usability, this alos means alt text, header levels, contrast ratios, readability, screen readers, keyboard navigation, special considerations for the hard of sight and hearing, etc.): https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ or at least use an easy checklist tool like Microsoft's WCAG analyzer: https://accessibilityinsights.io/

Ant Design is a fantastic toolkit for React developers. It's like having a box of building blocks that are not only stylish but also super functional. With Ant Design, you get a collection of pre-made React components that you can easily put together to create a sleek and modern look for your web projects. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned developer, Ant Design simplifies the process of making your web applications both visually appealing and user-friendly. It's a go-to choice for those who want a seamless blend of design and functionality in their React applications.

The backend UI is a combination of React + MUI + Ant Design.

Material-UI Ant Design Chakra UI Semantic UI React

ant-design -> Less configurable. Limited but nice components.

GitHub stars: 88k GitHub link: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design Documentation: https://ant.design/docs/react/getting-started