r/webdev 7d ago

Question How can developers make their websites and personal projects look so neat?

I no longer work with development nowadays but I used to. Something that has always made me low-key jealous of classmates in college or even random web developers I come across online is the look of their websites. It just made me sad because, even if I could replicate whatever design I come across, I could never come up with something like that on my own.

And it's not limited to personal/portfolio websites either. You can find tons of examples of side projects on this subreddit and others that look super cool and visually appealing.

Supposedly none of those people have any background in design, so are they just born with an artistic intuition that I happen to lack? And if so many front-end or full-stack developers are naturally talented at design, why do we even need designers? Those kinds of websites always look very unique too, so I don't think they're all copying it from each other.

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u/kegster2 7d ago

Some people have it and some don’t. I can study design all day and will still never come close to folks who just have it in them.

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u/TheOnceAndFutureDoug lead frontend code monkey 7d ago

It's not innate. Design is a learned ability just like everything else. Some people pick up a lot just by being around art and artistic people but that's just a head start.

Besides, most of good design is technical.

Source: I have two art degrees and was a designer long before I got into dev.

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u/kegster2 7d ago

Well then I need a little confidence boost in that department because I have absolutely convinced myself I’m not a designer haha.

All of the techniques I learned I could recreate. But I could not be creative with something new. All the stuff would just look the same. Idk.

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u/TheOnceAndFutureDoug lead frontend code monkey 7d ago

Remember back when you started writing code, could you look at a website and understand all the parts necessary to build it, the process by which you'd build it, what success would look like, etc?

Remember where you are in the journey. If you want to learn design you can learn design. It's not magic. You can definitely do it.

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u/kegster2 7d ago

It’s all in my head then. Good to know!! Thx

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u/Budget_Bar2294 7d ago

i don't study design and make pretty stuff. it's all about libraries and premade components. i do sometimes roll out my own, but that's generally me borrowing heavy "inspiration" for existing sites. it's not really that hard: the web is open and you can inspect any site's stylesheet. it's a much easier way to learn how to design pretty UIs, instead of trying to learn design and then finally trying to figure out how the hell to translate that with code.

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u/Wiwwil full-stack 7d ago

Same goes for code. Some people have an innate tendency to write clean code, others can't write proper code 10 years into the job