I was in your shoes about 10 years ago. Teaching myself to code by building an app I wanted for myself. My first app, I had a vision for, I knew exactly how I

I was in your shoes about 10 years ago. Teaching myself to code by building an app I wanted for myself. My first app, I had a vision for, I knew exactly how I wanted it to work and look. It came out just as I had hoped. My second app was much more popular, but looked TERRIBLE, a few blogs wrote reviews of my app and everybody commented about how awesome it was and how horrible it looked. Things were going well enough that I hired a designer, and WOW what a difference. It wasn't just the visual design, but the actual flow of how things worked, a miracle worker. Such an improvement. As I've continued, sometimes I have a vision of what I want, and I just build to that, and then go from user feedback, other times I get completely stuck on what I want the app to look like, and I'll find a designer to help. So, I've done both, and it depends. Some developers are great at design, I'm not one of those, but what I'd suggest is that, though design is important, I think some apps can get a following without great design. Once you see a bit of traction, then you can think about what needs to happen design wise. Another thing I've learned, from a design perspective, is that white-space is your friend. Find a consistent layout, I've found users flexbox to be very helpful in making css layout very easy.