Why use the library when you are not interested in Material Design?

[fatso83]

It is mentioned as a oneliner here and there that Material UI can be used to build your own design system. I think this deserves a few pointers for the people who are wondering what Material UI brings to the table if you are not really interested in using Material Design. If at all! Maybe you guys think it best to start from scratch in that case?

• I have searched the issues of this repository and believe that this is not a duplicate.

Motivation 🔦

We have been using the basic components all along, but they are always being styled with different colors, removing shadows, making them "flatter", etc. I find it hard to know how to use Material UI in the intended fasion when we do not have use for 20 different predefined font types and various pallettes. They all relate to some Material Design thing, and it's hard to relate this to our world. There is a lot of value here and there, but I think we are not using it in the intended fashion, as there is not very much "birds eye perspective" type of documentation. Having some articles that did not just touch upon the details, but had some discussion on why and how would be good.

[oliviertassinari]

Maybe you guys think it best to start from scratch in that case?

I would personally never start from scratch. Material-UI is a great option among others.

A quick simplification of the value proposition

v4

• Start from a word-class React design system
• Customize Material Design to match your use cases

v5

In the version we are actively working on, we try to provide better answers to the above:

1. Unstyled components: Provide a version of the components without any styles #6218. Our progress so far: https://next.material-ui.com/components/slider/#unstyled-slider
2. sx prop: Use @material-ui/system in the core components  #15561. Our progress so far: https://next.material-ui.com/system/basics/
3. A comprehensive set of components. Consistency. The ones that the open-source model can't sustain are paid, e.g. advanced date grid. We have a survey running.
4. Built-in accessibility: [material-ui][docs] Create ADA compliance documentation #14187. We plan to have a full audit.

Future

Things that we will keep exploring once the above is more mature:

• Community themes #21113 a community repository list of theme built for Material-UI, ones you can cherry-pick. https://mui-treasury.com/ on steroid
• [material-ui][examples] Create a Storybook template #21111 a starting point to generate the documentation for the custom design system.
• A SaaS to ease the operational pain of managing a design system.