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?
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The 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 ↗
Buy 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 ↗
I 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.
I really like Vuetify https://vuetifyjs.com/en/ ↗
Fantastic components, documentation and themes.
Tailwind is great. I use it everywhere just because i don't want to write/keep css files. For components i use Elastic UI.