Why I'm Building My Own React UI Library — and Why You Should Too

I've reached for component libraries in almost every project I've worked on. And for a long time I treated them as black boxes — drop in the CLI, copy the component, move on. It worked. But every time something didn't behave exactly the way I needed, I found myself staring into source code I didn't write, trying to understand an abstraction I never learned.

That's what started this series.

What you actually own when you install someone else's components

The honest answer: less than you think.

When you install a UI library, you're inheriting a set of decisions someone else made — about variants, about prop APIs, about which accessibility patterns to implement and which to skip, about how opinionated the styling should be. Those decisions might be excellent. For most projects, they are. But they're not yours, and that matters the moment you need to deviate from them.

The more important problem is what you don't learn. A developer who has only ever consumed UI libraries has never had to think about:

• How to design a component API that's easy to use but hard to misuse
• How to handle every state a real component needs — loading, disabled, error, empty
• How to make a component accessible without bolting on ARIA as an afterthought
• How to structure a library so tree-shaking works and bundle size stays predictable

These aren't advanced skills. They're the skills that separate someone who builds interfaces from someone who assembles them.

What we're building

Over 50 articles, we're going to build a complete React UI library from scratch and publish it to npm as a real, versioned, installable package.

20 primitive components — the building blocks everything else is made from. Button, Input, Textarea, Checkbox, Select, Toggle, Badge, Avatar, Tooltip, Icon, Typography, Card, and more. Each one built with TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS v4, and variant-managed with class-variance-authority (CVA).

20 compound components and layouts — the components that do the real work. Modal, Drawer, Tabs, Accordion, Toast system, Form, Table, Command Palette, Sidebar, Dashboard layout, and more. Each one composed directly from the primitives we built in the first half. You'll see exactly how the pieces connect.

10 articles on shipping and maintaining — project setup, npm publishing, Storybook documentation, testing, semantic versioning, and handling breaking changes. The work that turns a side project into something other people can actually depend on.

By the end, you'll have a library you understand completely — because you built every line of it.

The stack

Every decision here is deliberate.

React + TypeScript — TypeScript isn't optional for a library you're going to publish. Your consumers need autocomplete, prop validation, and inline documentation. Without it, you're shipping a worse developer experience.

Tailwind CSS v4 — the default choice for component styling right now. No runtime overhead, no CSS-in-JS complexity, and v4's native CSS variables make theming straightforward without a separate design token pipeline.

class-variance-authority (CVA) — the cleanest way to manage component variants without a pile of conditional classNames. A Button with five size variants and four intent variants becomes readable instead of a branching mess.

Vite in library mode — fast builds, proper ESM + CJS output, and TypeScript declarations out of the box. No custom webpack config, no build archaeology.

npm — we're publishing a real package. Not a GitHub repo you clone. Not a monorepo you copy from. A package with a version, a changelog, and an install command.

Who this series is for

This series assumes you're already comfortable with React and TypeScript. You've used a component library before. You know what a prop is, what a ref does, and roughly how hooks work.

What this series doesn't assume is that you've ever thought carefully about how to design a component — not just how to use one. That's the gap we're filling.

If you've ever looked at a component from shadcn/ui or Radix and thought "I wonder how this actually works" — this series is the answer.

Why build it instead of forking

A fair question. Forking shadcn/ui and stripping it back is faster than building from scratch. So why not do that?

Because the goal isn't the library. The goal is understanding the decisions that went into it. You can't learn component API design by inheriting someone else's API. You can't learn accessibility patterns by copying ARIA attributes you don't understand. And you can't learn how to maintain a versioned library by starting at v1.4.2.

Starting from zero is slower. It's also the only way to actually understand what you're building.

Up next: Setting up a React component library with Vite, TypeScript, and Tailwind v4 — we scaffold the project, configure Vite in library mode, and get Tailwind v4 running before a single component is written.

Related: How to build a custom hook that actually earns its abstraction — the same thinking that makes a good component API makes a good hook API. Worth reading before we get into component design.

Muhammad Athar is the founder of DesignDev.io and the engineer behind everything you read here. He writes about the decisions behind building real products — the components, the architecture, and the tradeoffs that don't make it into the tutorial.

Photo by Richard Heinen on Unsplash