From building UI components to designing a full-fledged website, designing as a hobby/indie developer is a daunting task.
In the world of web dev (at least in the React/Next.js ecosystem), libraries like shadcn and Tailwind CSS templates have made designing much easier for developers. I can't express enough gratitude towards the devs who maintain these and keep them FOSS! (I guess it's similar for other ecosystems too.)
However, there seems to be an unfortunate outcome that often makes these web apps look all the same these days. These libraries are great, though they have limitations. While they're excellent for reusability and familiarity across projects, they somehow suck the creativity out. Having these fixed, simplistic themes does help for subjectively easier development cycles, but as a user, it's plain boring!
I could scroll through Dribbble, Behance & Awwwards for hours; everything is so pretty. Yet when it comes to building, I stare into the blank Figma canvas. Coming up with anything feels so tough, and at one point, you just go back and go 'npx shadcn@latest init', 'npx shadcn@latest add' and build your idea out. This is also because setting up auth, making sure the db queries are right, and ensuring stuff is stored properly on the S3 bucket seems more directed and less abstract than designing that landing page.
Am I writing this blog after tirelessly spending hours trying to update deetnuts.com homepage and being unable to do so? Absolutely yes!
Making sure the text is done right, ensuring the heading and paragraph sizes and color shades add up to look good is somewhat painful and a trial-and-error game. Having to do it for every div, every section, every page is just a lot of work, not to mention taking the risk of trying something new.
What even is A/B testing? If it looks and feels good, it gets shipped here!
Maybe v0.dev could solve some of this pain. It seems promising, but I personally don't ride the AI hype train, and I don't think it could replace that human touch. Still, it could definitely help in the process. It's exciting to see where it goes!
I was never fond of designing until I got a chance to do so at spectrumpccoe.tech. Making banners was definitely easier; no need to keep doing that 'sm' 'md' & 'lg' stuff. Though it's physically more difficult and needed manual measurements (pixels don't translate that easily to inches in real life), it was a fun experience nevertheless.
Spectrum IRL Banners
This experience did leave me with a taste to go ahead and take an extra step to make stuff look subjectively prettier, at least to me. Even though it might take that extra effort, it seems worth it - until, obviously, you end up spending one month trying to get the UI right and never ship the update because you ended up burning out! Yep, nuts right! deetnuts.com homepage is still the same, and I'm writing this blog! It's been 2 months since I started updating the UI, but it didn't "feel" right, so I didn't ship it!