Steve Schoger

Designer behind Refactoring UI, Heroicons and Tailwind's look, now at Shopify

@steveschoger Kitchener, Canada128K followersDesign Tools Educators & Course Creators Open Source Makers

About Steve Schoger

Steve Schoger is a Canadian visual designer best known for teaching developers how to design. His bite-sized design tips on X — side-by-side before-and-after UI improvements — and his 'refactoring UI' videos on YouTube made him one of the most followed designers in the developer community.

Those tips grew into Refactoring UI, the 2018 book and video course he co-created with Adam Wathan, which packages practical, tactic-by-tactic design advice for people who aren't designers. Schoger became a partner at Tailwind Labs, where he designed much of the visual language of Tailwind CSS, Tailwind UI (later Tailwind Plus), the Tailwind websites and the free Heroicons set. He also made popular free resources such as Hero Patterns and the Zondicons icon set.

When Tailwind Labs joined Shopify in September 2026, Schoger moved with the team and is now a senior staff designer at Shopify. Lately he has been sharing videos of designing landing pages and dashboards with AI coding agents like Claude Code.

Products by Steve Schoger

Refactoring UI

refactoringui.com

Design book and video course for developers, co-created with Adam Wathan.

~$600K in 2020

Tailwind Plus (formerly Tailwind UI)

tailwindcss.com

acquired

Premium Tailwind components, templates and UI kits he helped design at Tailwind Labs.

Heroicons

heroicons.com

Free, MIT-licensed SVG icon set designed for Tailwind Labs.

Hero Patterns

heropatterns.com

Free collection of repeatable SVG background patterns.

Builds indie alternatives to:Font Awesome

Exit story

Tailwind CSS

→ Shopify · 2026

Wathan said joining Shopify gives Tailwind CSS a stable long-term home where it will keep being actively maintained, and lets the team build the framework in service of a large real-world product. Earlier in 2026 he had said AI tools had cut revenue by nearly 80% even as usage grew.

by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger

Steve Schoger's journey4 milestones · self-reported

Revenue (monthly, log scale)
First product
Exit
Launch / milestone

2018First product: Released Refactoring UI with Adam Wathan
2020Launch: Launched Tailwind UI and the free Heroicons set as a partner…
2020Revenue: Refactoring UI: ~$600K in a year≈ $50K/mo
2026Exit: Tailwind Labs joined Shopify

Timeline

2018 — Released Refactoring UI with Adam Wathan.
2020 — Launched Tailwind UI and the free Heroicons set as a partner at Tailwind Labs.
2020 — Refactoring UI did about $600K in sales in a single year.
2026 — Joined Shopify as a senior staff designer when Tailwind Labs joined the company.

How Steve builds

Design is learnable: specific tactics beat vague talent.
Start with function and hierarchy before visual polish.
Show, don't tell — before-and-after examples teach fastest.
Use constrained systems for spacing, type and color instead of picking values ad hoc.

Learn from Steve Schoger

[book]$99–$149

Refactoring UI

Design tactics for developers, with screencasts, a component gallery and color palettes.

by Steve Schoger

[youtube]

Steve Schoger on YouTube

Videos where he redesigns real interfaces step by step.

by Steve Schoger

Steve Schoger vs Adam Wathan

Steve Schoger FAQ

Who is Steve Schoger?

Steve Schoger is a Canadian visual designer, co-author of Refactoring UI and a former partner at Tailwind Labs who designed Heroicons and much of Tailwind's visual language; he is now a senior staff designer at Shopify.

What is Refactoring UI?

Refactoring UI is a book and video course by Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan that teaches developers practical design tactics; it launched in 2018 and is priced from $99.