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Ask HN: Favorite tools for building an aesthetic UI for a side project/MVP?
I've historically been more of a backend developer and my knack for building good looking UI's is just not there. I've read up on the basics of UI design and tried building out UI's using React + CSS, but it ends up being so time consuming for something that looks mediocre.
What are your favorite UI library or no/low code tool for building a good looking UI for side projects?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoThe best tool I've found to improve my UIs as someone who's not generally good at this stuff is wireframing. I use diagrams.net because it's free and has a web version. Once I stopped trying to implement and design my UIs at the same time they started getting much better. I force myself to go through multiple iterations over multiple days to let my understanding of the UI mature. First I make a shitty ugly one where I place the buttons and block-out the general look. Then I try to refine it, change the look, place the buttons in a more intuitive way. And I force myself to move things around and change the layout of the whole thing even when I'm satisfied with it. I also inspire myself from other people's work, like those you can find on Dribbble. Once you've got a nice wireframe down it's trivial to reproduce in any UI toolkit. Here's an example of the evolution of a single screen of an app I worked on a while ago, it's incomparable to the work of a professional UI designer but it's much better than I used to be able to do. You can see how some buttons disappear and are replaced by others as I refine the UX and how the layout changes over time: https://imgur.com/a/WExdqs3 https://imgur.com/a/WExdqs3
- patatino 6y agoI use ant design. It has some very powerful components which help moving fast. You can also customize the default colors or border radius if you don't like the default. I really wish I could use something like tailwind and build out my own components, but for side projects, I don't think the time is worth it.
- _throwawayaway 6y agoTailwind is great. I use it everywhere just because i don't want to write/keep css files. For components i use Elastic UI.
- bwh2 6y agoBuy a theme. They're inexpensive and contain plenty of pre-styled widgets and layouts. Here's one I've recently used for a side project: https://www.spruko.com/demo/spruha/spruha/HTML-LTR/verticalmenu-light/index.html https://www.spruko.com/demo/spruha/spruha/HTML-LTR/verticalm...
- andrefuchs 6y agoI really like Vuetify https://vuetifyjs.com/en/ https://vuetifyjs.com/en/ Fantastic components, documentation and themes.
- soulchild37 6y agoTailwindUI, mostly copy paste and tweak a bit and you have a decent looking UI