Creating a well-designed UI can be a challenge, especially if you're starting from scratch. That's why we created MasterUI, our brand-new, all-in-one UI kit for Figma that includes a pixel-perfect set of ready, commonly used components to help you get started with your next project. With MasterUI, you'll have everything you need to design beautiful interfaces, including buttons, form elements, icons, and more. Plus, all of the components are fully customizable, so you can easily change colors, fonts, and other attributes to match your brand.

What is MasterUI?

MasterUI is an original component library built to improve the efficiency of MasterBorn’s UI design projects, improve speed to market, and eliminate design inconsistencies and miscommunication from project teams.

If you're looking for a comprehensive UI kit that will save you time and help you create stunning designs, look no further than MasterUI – our ridiculously efficient UI kit for Figma designers.

Who’s behind MasterUI?

MasterUI is the brainchild of MasterBorn’s designers Janusz Magoński, Damian Fejdasz and Konrad Parasiński. The trio brought with them a can-do attitude and a much-needed fresh perspective. With strong branding experience under their belts, they perfectly understood the complexities of creating UI designs for various business branches.

Janusz has been working in the trenches of UI for five years now. Over that time, he’s had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects, varying in scope and duration. While working on many projects for different industries that had to meet different specifications and align with different style guides, Janusz increasingly sought ways to streamline his work and improve efficiency. “As my career progressed, I tried to optimize the design process as much as possible. This is why I used component libraries that I had already created for other projects,” he says.

He adds “Sometimes, if the project called for it, I used ready-made UI kits or rebuilt ready-made design systems. I quickly discovered, however, that each of these methods had its own set of drawbacks. While they greatly accelerated the design process by eliminating the need to start from scratch every time, they are usually packed with many redundant elements or components that generate unnecessary noise and distract you from the task at hand”.

In general, UI kits save you a lot of time when working on a project, but making them match the desired look and feel of the project is a tedious task that takes precious time. To remedy this, we sat down with the design team and built a library of components that are quick and easy to edit. This way, you can focus on the important things from the client's perspective rather than spending excessive hours trying to organize the file structure and prepare your project.

To properly understand what MasterUI actually is and what value it provides for design teams, a quick brush-up on the key design concepts would be necessary. Let’s jump right to it!

Atomic Design

In a nutshell, Atomic Design is a methodology for creating robust, scalable, and reusable component-based UI designs. The principle behind Atomic Design is to break down complex UI designs into smaller, more manageable pieces (atoms) that can be recombined to create new, more complex designs (molecules). By breaking down UI designs into smaller pieces, designers can create more consistent, reliable, and reusable design systems.

Brad Frost first coined the term “atomic” in his book Atomic Design. In it, he defines the five stages of atomic design:

• Atoms are the smallest building blocks of your UI design, such as buttons, inputs and icons.

• Molecules are groups of atoms that work together to form a more complex UI component, such as a form or a set of cards.

• Organisms are larger groups of atoms and molecules that come together to form even more complex components, such as headers and footers or search forms with autocomplete features.

• Templates are page-level layouts that place organisms in context within the overall design.

• Pages are complete web pages or screens that are built using the template and are populated with content

In the atomic design context, MasterUI is mostly made up of atoms and common molecules like pagination, toasts, and calendars. The kit allows you to use its components to quickly build other molecules, organisms, templates, and ultimately pages – but does not contain these elements itself.

What is a Design System

A design system is a set of rules or guidelines that dictate how elements should be designed and created for a specific purpose. In the context of Figma, a design system typically includes a color palette, typography, iconography, and other UI assets. A design system helps keep designs consistent and makes it easier to hand off projects to other designers or developers.

Design systems can be as simple or complex – depending on your needs. A simple style guide with some basic rules would be enough for smaller projects. Larger projects might require a more robust system with detailed specifications for every element.

Read another post on our blog for a deep dive into the benefits of design systems.

What is a UI kit?

A UI Kit is a pre-designed set of user interface elements that can be used to speed up the design process. A good UI Kit will contain a variety of common components such as buttons, input fields, and icons, that can be customized to fit the needs of your project.

A UI Kit can be a great time saver for designers working on web or mobile app projects. You can quickly create a polished interface without starting from scratch by beginning with a well-designed set of building blocks. And because professional designers usually design UI Kits, they can also help you raise the quality of your overall design.

But if you need to prototype a project rapidly, a UI Kit is the answer. If you're looking for a high-quality UI Kit for Figma, we recommend checking out MasterUI. It's an all-in-one solution with everything you need to design beautiful interfaces for web and mobile apps.

UI kits vs Design systems: understanding the difference

A design system is a collection of reusable components that are used to build digital products. They are the foundation for developing the functionalities of digital products that align with a coherent visual language. They are usually complex libraries dedicated to particular products – which means adapting them to new products is a tedious, long process that takes much of the designers’ bandwidth.

A UI kit, on the other hand, is a set of critical user interface elements that you can use to build your own web or mobile app. These elements can be quickly modified and used to build websites and applications – or more advanced libraries if the project calls for it.

Design systems are becoming more popular with product teams as they help them to work more efficiently and ensure consistency. They can also be helpful for managing change and growth within an organization. However, they can be complex to create and maintain, so they may not be suitable for all organizations.

UI kits can be a good option if you’re looking for a quick way to get started with building your own digital product. They’re also generally easier to create and maintain than complex design systems.

By comparison, design systems often come with incomplete usage guidelines and principles – or don't have them at all. Certain design systems like Human Interface Guidelines or Google’s Material Design are exceptions to the rule, but their guidelines are still occasionally vague and leave much to interpretation.

Also, design systems developed by industry giants like Google or Apple are a far cry from those developed by smaller product companies like, for example, Tripadvisor – primarily in terms of the amount of guidelines they provide.

So… Design System, UI Kit or… MasterUI?

MasterUI is in the sweet spot between a UI kit and a design system. Janusz Magoński emphasizes that simplicity and efficiency are the main reasons why the MasterBorn team switched to MasterUI as the default for all design projects. He goes on to add, “what I personally like most about MasterUI is the ease with which the file can be rebuilt very quickly to suit the needs of a particular project, and the lack of redundant elements that I would never use in this project.”

What makes MasterUI so unique

With MasterUI, you’ll never have to start a project from a blank page again. At the same time, you can save yourself from the typical chaos associated with starting a new project. MasterUI lets you kickstart and deliver the final product much faster. For the design team, it translates into hundreds of hours saved working on a project.

MasterUI allows you to edit anything with one click – quickly adjust the style of your project and evaluate your idea immediately.

With MasterUI’s collection of ready-to-use components, you can apply a ready-made set built using auto layout and variants and not waste your time on repeatable work.

MasterUI: Pros and cons for Figma designers

Using MasterUI’s nested components, you can start your project in Figma in just a few clicks. MasterUI brings you all the goodies to kickstart any UI project – all 100% free!

By using MasterUI in Figma, you can take advantage of the platform’s powerful collaborative features. As a result, everyone is on the same page and using the same source of truth.

MasterUI brings many benefits to Figma designers using it:

• Pixel-perfect: We used an 8px grid to create the components — all spacing/size is 8px or its multiplier (8, 16, 24, 32 etc.).

• Auto layout: Components are built with auto-layout so they scale easily and adapt to different resolutions.

• Variants: Components are organized in variants — you can easily edit the state, size, or icon's position.

• Adjustable typography and styles: All components have defined styles and typography for global editing.

• Scalability: The library can be easily extended with your components — we have prepared an empty template to organize new components.

• Editing guide: We wrote detailed documentation on editing and using our product.

Click here to get MasterUI.

Because of its universal application, MasterUI obviously does not have many of the components that are used in the design of digital products. Fortunately, it has a strong enough base, which allows you to quickly expand the library of assets.

MasterUI: Pros and cons for Startup Founders and CEOs

A set of reusable components and interactions like MasterUI serves as your repository of buttons, forms, and page layouts that all share a consistent look and feel.

It allows developers, designers and CEOs to vastly improve the workflow and ensure the product is designed coherently.

With a well-organized library of components, we can very quickly create MVPs for our customers and our internal products. Every CEO knows that timing is crucial in the business world. MasterUI allows design teams to start projects quickly and effectively by using a ready-made set of components.

The biggest disadvantage of MasterUI in the business world is that CEOs are rarely designers, and therefore cannot experience how powerful a tool like MasterUI is.

What’s in it for me?

In general, whether you are a designer or CEO, you gain efficiency and a faster time to market without the need to reinvent the wheel. Without the need to start each project from a blank slate, MasterUI saves you a week on average. In addition, when doing MVPs, which usually leave very little time for the design, keeping the file structure in order can be hard, as it’s not the focus point– the final output is.

Key benefit for designers: higher efficiency

Creating components from scratch is a tedious and repetitive process. MasterUI can help you cut it down to just four hours. This is especially effective when creating many projects from scratch and repeatedly designing the same components.

The number of designers and developers increases as your application grows – some of them working in different locations, sometimes across continents. At the same time, some team members might be leaving the project, and others joining it. In other words, there is a lot happening.

Such dynamics when working on a project can easily lead to massive inconsistencies. On top of that, there can be miscommunication, which all combined encourages an environment where there is no control over how the different parts of an app look and behave.

Design systems are a great solution to this problem as they become the final authority but developing them from scratch is a tedious and complex process. At the same time, building a design system is not always the best way forward if the work needs to be done quickly. This is where UI kits like MasterUI make a difference, as they eliminate the massive overhead of work when preparing a new UI project.

At MasterBorn, we decided to develop MasterUI to tackle these problems and eliminate unnecessary guesswork when starting and working on UI projects. MasterUI was born as a ready-made set of basic, fully editable components that will let you begin any project faster.

Key benefit for business: reduced time to market

Timing is crucial in the business world. MasterUI allows design teams to start projects quickly and effectively by using a ready-made set of components. They are designed to keep any project unique and boost a designer’s workflow. That makes it perfect for MVP, too!

How we use MasterUI at MasterBorn

We use MasterUI when starting work on the UI side of a project. Rather than using complex component libraries or UI kits or rebuilding off-the-shelf design systems, we use a library of components that we have developed and that are essential for each project.

This allows us to start the project very quickly, focus only on the essential elements and, as a result, deliver the desired design to the client more quickly and efficiently.

Summary

A design system is the way to go if you want to design in a scalable and sustainable way, yet still want to work according to clearly established visual rules and principles. A UI kit like MasterUI will be your best friend if you’re after greater control over editing your component library and your project has a tight deadline. This is especially important for projects which are in an early phase, where numerous iterations and changes are expected.

If you are leaning towards building a small-scale, mostly visual interface design – consistency and shorter time to market are paramount. Master UI will then be the perfect ally for you in your battle against a looming deadline – it serves as a solid foundation to kickstart your project and get the work done more efficiently.

Get your all-in-one MasterUI kit.