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Re: Graphic Design and UX - you can get pretty far by using a component library (Material, Semantic, etc) and even buy full site templates for pretty reasonable

Re: Graphic Design and UX - you can get pretty far by using a component library (Material, Semantic, etc) and even buy full site templates for pretty reasonable prices. You can also contract out design to things like 99designs. To add to this list: marketing. I don't want to grow social media accounts or do cold calls/emails to start to get customers.

the_only_law 5y ago
Similar but a bit different. I’ve had some cool ideas for some games that I’m 100% confident I could make a pretty neat backend for, but graphics, sounds, etc. not my forte at all.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  Creative assets are what's holding me back from pursuing a lot of my game ideas too. Someone should make an AI to generate art and sound assets for those of us without the skills. That way I can just do something like spore where I feed it inputs and out pops a bitmap.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Someone I know mentioned wanting to do something similar to this. I guess the hard part is how to get the model to generate what you want and also generate it in the format you need.
- bemmu 5y ago
  There are really good marketplaces for buying game assets. Especially if you adopt a low poly style, you can get very far with bought meshes. My go-to sites are CGTrader for meshes, SoundSnap for sounds.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I’ll have to look into it. If I ever put any amount of effort into one of these ideas, I don’t think I’d mind paying commission for some stuff either, but at the end of the day I’m just a guy who can write code ok and has some neat game ideas. I don’t have a massive budget for my side projects.
nerdponx 5y ago
Regarding contracting, remember that there is a pretty large population of beginner graphic designers, UX/UI designers, and frontend devs who need portfolio projects, and might be willing to work for free or very low cost.
- Cerium 5y ago
  Before following this advice, please read [1] first. [1] https://www.nospec.com/ https://www.nospec.com/
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    That isn't at all what I was suggesting. I am talking about proper contract work, or pro bono volunteer work.
    - Cerium 4y ago
      Thanks for the clarification, I wanted to put this out there, since I have seen the issue from both sides.
    - benjaminwootton 4y ago
      What is it about design and designers that makes people think they would want to or be willing to work for free for a portfolio? It seems unique to that role, yet good design is rare and valuable as the top end in any field.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        It's not specific to design. Data science and software engineering are similar.
ufmace 5y ago
I actually haven't had good experience with most of this on the graphic design and UI front. If I'm building, say, a Rails web app, I want my front-end stuff to integrate with Rails reasonably well. Which means ERB or HAML templates with common elements properly extracted out into shared views, maintainable CSS in SASS, that sort of thing. What most of these UI services and contractors seem to actually deliver is something quite different. 99designs output is literally just an image of what they think your website should look like. Actually writing all of the HTML and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to you. It makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture of what my site could look like that requires me to do all of the actual work? Most entry-level contractors seem to want to deliver self-contained HTML and CSS that are usually written with some tool that creates incomprehensible actual code. They have no clue about templating and extracting common elements out. This means that I have to basically rewrite whatever they deliver to actually integrate with the web app. Which again makes me think, why am I paying for this? IMO, if I'm going to pay someone for front-end design work, I want to be able to point them at my Github repo, with a functional site with ugly basic HTML, say basically "make this look pretty", and they open a PR with their work which works with my existing templates to add the appropriate HTML structure and CSS classes and IDs, and CSS, fonts and images all in the right places for the framework I'm using. I'm willing to help and provide advice and guidance, but I don't want to take delivery of something completely unsuited and have to integrate it myself. As a side note, if anyone's looking to get into web design, if you learn enough about coding to do the above and are also great at making websites look good, I expect you'll have boatloads of money thrown at you.
- lolinder 5y ago
  The skills required to design something that looks good and provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and CSS. I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs. More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for. If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.
lonk11 4y ago
I used Material for my hobby project [1] and got this feedback: "Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like the UI. It seems like a demo for a Material design app. I think the site has lots of potential, but without an original, personal style it might put off users. It doesn't have to be complicated, just something recognizable." So a standard component library can get you started quickly, but you might want to tweak it. A few things I changed - made icon buttons smaller (the default sizes are way too big), changed the pills to be white with black border instead of just grey background. [1] - https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  Check out the mui.com website. The whole doc site is built using their material UI component library, yet it looks nothing like a cookie cutter material design app. That is to say, if you put in the time a material site can definitely look good.

the_only_law 5y ago

Similar but a bit different. I’ve had some cool ideas for some games that I’m 100% confident I could make a pretty neat backend for, but graphics, sounds, etc. not my forte at all.

candiddevmike 5y ago
Creative assets are what's holding me back from pursuing a lot of my game ideas too. Someone should make an AI to generate art and sound assets for those of us without the skills. That way I can just do something like spore where I feed it inputs and out pops a bitmap.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Someone I know mentioned wanting to do something similar to this. I guess the hard part is how to get the model to generate what you want and also generate it in the format you need.
bemmu 5y ago
There are really good marketplaces for buying game assets. Especially if you adopt a low poly style, you can get very far with bought meshes. My go-to sites are CGTrader for meshes, SoundSnap for sounds.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I’ll have to look into it. If I ever put any amount of effort into one of these ideas, I don’t think I’d mind paying commission for some stuff either, but at the end of the day I’m just a guy who can write code ok and has some neat game ideas. I don’t have a massive budget for my side projects.

nerdponx 5y ago

Regarding contracting, remember that there is a pretty large population of beginner graphic designers, UX/UI designers, and frontend devs who need portfolio projects, and might be willing to work for free or very low cost.

Cerium 5y ago
Before following this advice, please read [1] first. [1] https://www.nospec.com/ https://www.nospec.com/
- nerdponx 5y ago
  That isn't at all what I was suggesting. I am talking about proper contract work, or pro bono volunteer work.
  - Cerium 4y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, I wanted to put this out there, since I have seen the issue from both sides.
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    What is it about design and designers that makes people think they would want to or be willing to work for free for a portfolio? It seems unique to that role, yet good design is rare and valuable as the top end in any field.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      It's not specific to design. Data science and software engineering are similar.

ufmace 5y ago

I actually haven't had good experience with most of this on the graphic design and UI front. If I'm building, say, a Rails web app, I want my front-end stuff to integrate with Rails reasonably well. Which means ERB or HAML templates with common elements properly extracted out into shared views, maintainable CSS in SASS, that sort of thing. What most of these UI services and contractors seem to actually deliver is something quite different. 99designs output is literally just an image of what they think your website should look like. Actually writing all of the HTML and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to you. It makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture of what my site could look like that requires me to do all of the actual work? Most entry-level contractors seem to want to deliver self-contained HTML and CSS that are usually written with some tool that creates incomprehensible actual code. They have no clue about templating and extracting common elements out. This means that I have to basically rewrite whatever they deliver to actually integrate with the web app. Which again makes me think, why am I paying for this? IMO, if I'm going to pay someone for front-end design work, I want to be able to point them at my Github repo, with a functional site with ugly basic HTML, say basically "make this look pretty", and they open a PR with their work which works with my existing templates to add the appropriate HTML structure and CSS classes and IDs, and CSS, fonts and images all in the right places for the framework I'm using. I'm willing to help and provide advice and guidance, but I don't want to take delivery of something completely unsuited and have to integrate it myself. As a side note, if anyone's looking to get into web design, if you learn enough about coding to do the above and are also great at making websites look good, I expect you'll have boatloads of money thrown at you.

lolinder 5y ago
The skills required to design something that looks good and provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and CSS. I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs. More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for. If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.

lonk11 4y ago

I used Material for my hobby project [1] and got this feedback: "Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like the UI. It seems like a demo for a Material design app. I think the site has lots of potential, but without an original, personal style it might put off users. It doesn't have to be complicated, just something recognizable." So a standard component library can get you started quickly, but you might want to tweak it. A few things I changed - made icon buttons smaller (the default sizes are way too big), changed the pills to be white with black border instead of just grey background. [1] - https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com

dinkleberg 4y ago
Check out the mui.com website. The whole doc site is built using their material UI component library, yet it looks nothing like a cookie cutter material design app. That is to say, if you put in the time a material site can definitely look good.