Introduction

Building a website that looks distinct is hard. Most UI libraries are clean, safe, and — honestly — look the same. RetroUI is the opposite. It is a neobrutalist design system: thick borders, hard offset shadows, square corners, and bold display type. Playful, high-contrast, and unmistakably yours.

RetroUI is a registry of components restyled to the neobrutalist recipe. You install the code directly into your project with the shadcn CLI, own it, and customize it however you like — no black-box npm package to fight.

Two primitives, one style#

Every RetroUI component ships in two variants, so you can pick the primitive you already use:

• Radix UI — the primitives most shadcn projects are built on.
• Base UI — the newer primitives from the Radix / MUI team.

Same neobrutalist look, same exports, same API — just a different engine underneath. You choose one per component at install time.

What you get#

• Open code — the components land in your codebase. Read them, edit them, extend them.
• Neobrutalist by default — bold borders, hard shadows, press animations and heavy headings, all tuned to work together.
• Accessible — built on Radix / Base UI primitives, so keyboard and screen-reader support come for free.
• CLI-installable — shadcn add straight from the RetroUI registry, with npm / pnpm / yarn / bun.
• AI-ready — open code plus an MCP server so your AI editor can add components by name.

Get started#

Head to the Installation guide to set RetroUI up in your project, or browse the components to see what is available.