Steve Schoger does not talk about design the way design schools do. There are no color wheels on the wall,
no vague lectures about "visual hierarchy" with a meaningful pause. He shows you a broken interface -
too much padding, wrong font weight, colors that fight each other - and he fixes it in front of you.
Then he explains exactly why each change works. That's the whole method. And that method turned a
Kitchener, Ontario designer into one of the most followed design educators on the internet.
He's a partner at Tailwind Labs, working alongside Adam Wathan on Tailwind CSS and Tailwind UI.
Before that, he ran Duke Street Studio, a boutique design consultancy he founded in 2016.
Before that, he did time in the corporate trenches at Sun Life Financial and Desire2Learn.
He started designing for the web in the early 2000s when "responsive design" wasn't a word
and pixels were something you counted by hand. Two decades in, he still obsesses over the
space between a label and its input field.
The Twitter Experiment That Took Over His Career
Around 2017, Steve started posting design tips to Twitter. Not thought leadership. Not career advice.
Actual tactical tips - "here's an interface problem, here's the specific change that fixes it,
here's why it works." The tips were practical. They were visual. They were the kind of thing
a senior designer would mutter under their breath while reviewing a junior's work, except
Steve was saying it out loud to anyone who'd listen.
Under 2,000 people were listening when he started. Within a few years, that number crossed
127,000. Each post was a tiny design lesson - before-and-after screenshots with crisp,
specific explanations. No hand-waving. The internet, it turned out, was desperate for
designers who could actually explain what they were doing.
Refactoring UI: A Book That Changed How Developers Think About Design
The book arrived in 2018-2019. Steve co-wrote it with Adam Wathan, the developer behind Tailwind CSS.
It's called Refactoring UI and it is, without exaggeration, the book that a generation
of developers used to stop making ugly interfaces. Not because it covers everything. Because it
covers the right things, in the right order, with the right examples.
Wathan handled the technical scaffolding. Schoger handled everything you actually see -
the 250 pages of illustrations, the visual system, the design language of the book itself.
It was self-published, no traditional publisher, no advance. Just a Gumroad page and a
Twitter following that had spent two years waiting for exactly this. The book crossed
$2.5 million in sales. The market had been waiting for someone to explain design
to developers in developer terms. Steve and Adam were first.
Speaking about the approach he and Adam took, the philosophy was direct: give developers
practical, actionable tactics rather than high-level theory. The book covers spacing,
color, typography, hierarchy, and interface structure - but always through specific
examples, never through abstraction. You don't read it and think "that's interesting."
You read it and immediately open a file to fix something.
Free Resources, Given Away Without a Second Thought
While building toward Refactoring UI, Steve was giving things away. Zondicons came first -
a complete premium SVG icon set, free. Then Hero Patterns - a generator for beautiful,
repeatable SVG backgrounds, free. Then Heroicons, co-created with the Tailwind team,
an MIT-licensed icon library that has since become the default icon choice for
Tailwind UI components.
None of this was a calculated marketing move. Or if it was, it was a long game played
by someone who genuinely wanted the design community to have better tools. Heroicons
is now one of the most used icon libraries in the web ecosystem. Zondicons and
Hero Patterns still get daily traffic years after their release. Steve didn't need
to monetize them. He built Refactoring UI for that. The free resources were just
what he made when he had an idea that felt useful.
Tailwind Labs: Where the Partnership Became a Company
The success of Refactoring UI did something useful: it funded Tailwind Labs. Adam Wathan
had been working on Tailwind CSS as an open-source project. Schoger's design work on
Refactoring UI gave them the capital and credibility to build Tailwind UI -
a commercial component library. It launched in 2020 and reached $2 million in revenue
within five months. Within two years, Tailwind Labs had crossed $4 million total.
Steve became a full partner in the company, not a contractor or a hire. This is the
distinction that matters: he's not the designer at Tailwind Labs, he's an owner.
Every Tailwind UI component, every Heroicons update, every visual decision carries
his fingerprints. He's stopped taking client work - the products keep him occupied.
On Stage: Design Tips for Live Audiences
He has taken the design tip format to conference stages worldwide. At SmashingConf SF 2019,
he live-redesigned real interfaces in front of an audience - the same before-and-after
format from Twitter, but in real time. At SmashingConf New York 2022, he demonstrated
how to construct icons geometrically using Figma, turning what sounds like a dry
technical talk into something people actually left talking about. He's done Laracon,
Fluxible, Full Stack Radio appearances, podcast interviews. The content is always the same:
specific, visual, actionable.
He's a naturally approachable teacher. His explanations don't condescend. He assumes
the audience is smart and just needs the right framework. His favorite high school
teacher was his art teacher, Mr. Garry - a detail he mentioned in a podcast interview
in a way that suggests the influence runs deeper than nostalgia. He knows what it's
like when someone makes a subject click for you. He tries to be that for his audience.
The YouTube Reboot and What's Next
In January 2025, Steve announced plans to reboot the Refactoring UI YouTube channel.
He asked the community directly: what interfaces do you want to see redesigned?
This is classic Schoger - he doesn't plan content in a vacuum, he asks the people
who will watch it what they actually need. The YouTube channel has existing content
including "How to Think Like a Visual Designer" and "The Little Details of UI Design,"
but the reboot promises a fresh run of redesign examples in the same practical,
before-and-after format that built his following in the first place.
He's not trying to be the next big design influencer. He's trying to keep being
useful to the same audience he's always served: developers who want to design better,
designers who want to explain their decisions more clearly, and anyone who has ever
looked at an interface they built and known something was wrong but couldn't say what.
Steve Schoger can say what. And he'll show you how to fix it.
Based in Kitchener, Ontario - not exactly a global design capital. He became influential anyway, proof that good ideas don't care about your postal code.
Refactoring UI had no traditional publisher. No advance, no agent, no gatekeepers. Just a Gumroad link and an audience that already trusted him.
His personal website runs on TailwindCSS and Nuxt.js. He eats his own cooking, which is probably why it looks good.
He has 24+ public GitHub repositories despite being primarily a visual designer, not a developer. He ships things.
His Twitter design tips use the same "before and after" format every time. No reinvention needed - when the format works, you stick with it.
His favorite high school teacher was his art teacher, Mr. Garry. Some influences just stick.
