Any Turnkey Design solution for Developers that lack Design skills?
There are a ton of resources out there to learn design, but I am looking for something like grammarly for design.
Even if you are bad with grammar, you can write good content and use grammarly to correct the grammar faults. Similarly, a lot of developers, like me, lack design skills. Is there any turnkey solution to this?
I searched for an hour and came across many amazing resources to learn design from, but no done-for-developers solution to this.
If there is none, then I will be more than happy to learn design and make such a solution. Would you be interested in that solution?
It depends on whether you mean UX or UI design.
Making things look pretty (or at least not shocking) isn't too hard now that there are so many open source design systems and resources. For most projects, you're problem 100% fine just using these and inserting your own content. http://bloom.appearhere.co.uk/, http://www.carbondesignsystem.com/, https://polaris.shopify.com/ and https://atlassian.design/ are my favourites. I use https://github.com/palantir/blueprint for my job and that's pretty good for enterprise stuff too.
UX is going to be a little bit harder. You can't really encapsulate it in ready-made components and you have to get into thinking about things at a higher level. It becomes more about flows and intuitions than it does CSS rules.
As for 'Grammarly for design', you might struggle there with something that's worth using. I know AirBnb is working on this stuff but it's not ready for use yet (https://airbnb.design/the-evolution-of-tools/). If you're interested in the space, check out https://algorithms.design/ where they have loads of good examples of tech-driven design solutions.
For me that tool is Bootstrap. However, the downside that you'll frequently hear is "all Bootstrap sites look the same".
So, we just made some tools that make it easy to customize Bootstrap. The UI kit builder lets you pick the colors, fonts, icons and a few other style options. Then you're off and running with a unique looking site that has all the responsive design and consistency benefits of Bootstrap.
https://themestr.app/builder
good list
zeph.co/design is a short list of ideas to make your site look better. It's as "done for developers" as I could achieve (even giving you code samples and pictures), and only takes 2 or 3 minutes to read.
Something like "Grammarly for Design" would require good AI. The scope is pretty massive.
If you're using Vue or React there are things like ElementUI sort of UI toolkits that have 85% of the components a typical web app might need all professionally styled. Prime React probably has the most comprehensive set I've seen. There are mobile equivalents too like NativeBase.
What I really want though, is a drag and drop prototyping tool that has images of all the components in those UI kits and canvas I can just drop them into to quickly prototype UI. I know some of them come with sketch files, but that's honestly completely useless to me and a terrible workflow from my developer perspective. I don't want to fight with a tool made for designers. I just want something I can slap together really fast for Good Enough™ UI
Sure, including page structure:
Using pre-built kits are preventive, the Grammarly reference you made is an auto-correct, which doesn't/can't exist.
Hi Sebastien - I found your post valuable, so thanks for that! I haven't come across Shard before. Is it basically a bootstrap 4 theme?
@colaba Glad it helped! :)
Shards isn't a theme, it's a UI kit. It's a layer on top of Bootstrap 4 that sets standards for design/behavior of individual elements.
So you can use Bootstrap to structure the page, Shards to apply an instant design style, and then add custom code to make your website your own.
Do you mean UI/UX kits? They are done-for-you elements you can plug in to your development projects. An example is bootstrap.
Yeah, UI toolkits comes close enough. We can add recommendations for layouts, color combinations, and font combinations to it to make it more turnkey. What do you think?
What you are asking for is too much.
I don't think it is. I think it's exactly right. Design is great but it shouldn't be a blocker to making great things that look good.