MUI

About the company

MUI is a dev tools company focused on building React libraries. Its flagship product is Material UI, which came to life before the company even existed. At some point, it was the best component library for React and continues to be one of the most recognized ones. Now, as a fully-fledged bootstrapped company, MUI develops other libraries around component building and styling, such as Base UI (unstyled), MUI X (advanced components), and Pigment CSS (zero-runtime CSS-in-JS). By the time I left, the company had about 30+ employees, with the design team being four people.

My journey there

When I joined, the company had around just six people, and I was the very first non-developer hire. At first, my role included supporting a significant rebrand with the purpose of positioning the now-called MUI company as an entity bigger than its flagship product, Material UI. While developing this work, my role included a lot of product culture development, as the team barely had any structure around milestone planning, product indicators, and even marketing.

Over time, my role as lead designer evolved to encompass a lot of product strategy and managerial responsibilities, where I participated in the shaping phase of all projects in the company and the hiring process of multiple roles, including all designers that came after me. I oversaw and directly contributed to the strategy and design for the development of Material UI v6, Base UI, and Pigment CSS. And, as a team, my goal has always been to build an organization where designers can lead their group, guiding them towards building what users really want, in a nice, polished, and organized way.

Notable contributions

As an open-source-based company, all my contributions to MUI over the years can be seen by visiting the following repositories: Material UI (around 300+ PRs!), Base UI, Pigment CSS, and MUI X. And as always, it's super hard to condense many years of work into a digestable list, but here’s a few highlights.

Rebrand to MUI

In hindsight, that was a reasonably subtle rebrand, but practically speaking, it involved a whole refresh of the site, much of which is still live today. I virtually touched on all corners of both the website and docs design and closely maintained it throughout my whole tenure. Still so much left to do and fix!

A couple of screenshots from nice-looking pages on the website and docs.

Check out the live version and read the rebrand blog post to learn more about it.

Joy UI

Although sort of frozen right now, Joy UI is a project I have very close to my heart. We introduced it with the purpose of being an alternative to Material UI. We were excited to use it as a testing ground, and I’m still pretty confident that it would be massive today if it had been pushed further. Lots of cool use of CSS variables and other thoughtful component library insights.

Some of the custom-made templates for Joy UI.

Read the Joy UI introduction blog post to learn more about it and see live previews of the templates highlighted above.

Managerial

Among all the Notion handbook stuff I’ve written for MUI, I’m actually the proudest of the Design Team Philosophy, which I still believe in a lot. Really tried to bring to MUI designers with a high level of agency and knack for leadership.

Blog posts

To wrap the contributions section up, here’s a list of all the blog posts I’ve been involved in and/or wrote myself, excluding the ones part of the projects above that were already linked.

Closing thoughts

MUI was my very first all-international and open-source professional experience. Definitely a lot of learning and growth from working all in the open like that, as well as with people from all over the globe in a preferredly async model. Lots of challenges with communication, team building, alignment, and such. But it totally made me a much more technical and detail-oriented designer, and person, that’s for sure.

I look back on my time at MUI fondly, as I still follow everything the team is shipping very closely! It was also my first managerial position, where I helped guide the careers of a handful of people, participating in their performance review processes, and other more strategic organizational aspects of the whole company. It’s one of the best teams out there, and I miss everyone!