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I've been building my prototype using spectre.css, but I'm not a designer

2 points by swman ↗ HN
Hey everyone. I thought I'd post here - fairly new to programming and I've been teaching myself web dev. I've been putting together a prototype for an idea I've had - uses a Phoenix back end, front end is a react + redux SPA. Unfortunately I am a terrible designer and so I've basically just used a library called spectre.css and only modified a few css classes (like giving buttons different colors, etc.).

I'm about 70% or so done with core functionality, but each time I look at my prototype I can't help but feel like... man, this looks so basic! I have been doing this for only a few months now, and I don't really have many colleagues who know this stuff (I'm not a engineer or smart guy like that - just decided to change my career path lol and I'm enjoying building stuff).

Question for you smart people out there who have built any web sites or web applications. Did you end up finding a partner who is good at UI design to help you once you had your core functionality down? For me, the core functionality lies in the geo location capability that I have been working on and being able to work with the map. Things like how pages look and feel - I've tried my best after studying how other sites do it.

Thanks.

2 comments

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pedalpete
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.

brudgers
0. Most of the time, functional design trumps aesthetic design. Everybody is a tool user. The two exceptions are truly offensive aesthetics and fashion.

1. Most of the time, nobody cares about one designer's pixel perfection except that designer and maybe a hand full of critics who happen to come across it.

2. Unless you're writing a program that helps designers for free, there is no upside to working on your project for free.

3. The way to team up with a designer is to pay them. Designers get four orders of magnitude more offers to work on someone else's idea for free than programmers get startup pitches from "ideas" people.

4. Comparing my work to the best things on the internet has some use so long as I keep in mind that the best things on the internet are either built by a large team or built over a long period of time or both.

Good luck.