Software Engineer Samuel Cousin Launches Naki UI, Expanding Dart’s Possibilities on the Web

Mary Nnah

Nigerian software engineer and technology entrepreneur Samuel Cousin has launched Naki UI, an open-source design system created for Jaspr, a web framework that allows developers to build websites using the Dart programming language.

Released on pub.dev in September, Naki UI gives developers more than 75 reusable interface components and design utilities for creating modern web products. Its ambition is easy to understand: to give people building with Jaspr a polished, familiar foundation in much the same way Material has become a familiar design foundation for Flutter developers.

The project’s message — “Same familiar patterns. Built for the web.” — reflects Cousin’s wider goal of making web development with Dart more approachable without asking developers to repeatedly rebuild the same basic parts of an application.

Within days of its release, Naki UI received public recognition from Andrew Brogdon, a Staff Developer Relations Engineer at Google whose work includes Dart, Flutter, generative user interfaces and agentic applications. Reacting to the emergence of Naki UI, Brogdon wrote that he “could not be happier” to see Jaspr grow to the point where developers are creating design languages specifically for it.
That recognition is particularly significant because Naki UI is being built on top of Jaspr, the open-source framework created by German software engineer Kilian Schulte. Schulte began building Jaspr in 2022 to give Dart and Flutter developers a more natural route to building websites. The framework has since grown into an increasingly visible part of the Dart ecosystem.

Jaspr provides the foundation for building for the web with Dart, while Naki UI focuses on the reusable visual building blocks developers need to turn that foundation into complete products.

Naki UI is not Cousin’s first contribution to the Jaspr ecosystem. Earlier in 2026, he published Jaspr icon packages and Jaspr Convert HTML, tools aimed at removing repetitive work and making the framework easier to use. Naki UI expands that effort from individual utilities into a broader open-source design system.

His work also extends beyond developer tools. Cousin is the founder behind PoddinApp and PoddinPay, technology products developed around digital commerce, payments and the needs of small businesses and independent online sellers. Those experiences have given him first-hand exposure to the cost and complexity of repeatedly building digital products from the ground up.
Naki UI turns part of that experience into shared infrastructure: instead of solving the same interface problems inside one company, the project makes reusable solutions available to developers around the world.

The project also carries a broader development story. As an open-source technology created from Nigeria for a global developer community, Naki UI demonstrates how African engineers can contribute not only consumer applications, but also the underlying tools on which other digital products are built.
Its clearest connection to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is SDG 9 — Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure — through its contribution to open digital infrastructure and software innovation. Its free and open-source nature also supports the spirit of SDG 4 on access to learning resources and SDG 8 on productive work and economic growth by making professional development tools available without a proprietary entry barrier.

These are areas of alignment rather than claims of measured social impact; the project’s longer-term effect will depend on adoption, community participation and the products developers ultimately build with it.

For Cousin, the long-term opportunity is larger than a single software library. Naki UI represents an attempt to help strengthen the wider Dart-on-the-web ecosystem by giving developers a dependable starting point for building new ideas.

Its early recognition is encouraging, but the project is still at the beginning of its journey. The next test will be whether developers adopt it, contribute to it and use it to create products of their own.
For now, Naki UI makes a simple statement about where African participation in global technology can go next: from using the world’s software to building some of the tools the world can use.