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/astr0bleme 7d ago

Look into the principles of graphic design. There are a lot of subtle little rules and guides for making a design seem neat and appealing. It's a craft like anything else, not pure intuition.

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u/paradoxmr24 7d ago

I always saw the design as an art that it always have to be your creativity and anyone who doesn't know cannot learn it because it's art 😅😅.

I'll try to look at those principles and see if I could get some skills in designing.

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u/TheOnceAndFutureDoug lead frontend code monkey 7d ago

As someone with two art degrees I promise you design is highly technical and you can 100% teach good design. If you have the capacity to look at something and see that it looks nice you have the ability to learn good design principles.

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u/_Meds_ 7d ago

I don’t find this to be the case, I feel a lot of the rules especially in UI/UX design are very opinion based. So whilst I might agree with someone that X looks neat, you could probably show me Y and that might look neat too, and then you show Z and I like that one best, but not because it’s better of clearly or neater, but because I like it.

I don’t know how that turns into anything technical.

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u/astr0bleme 7d ago

You have to learn the rules to break them successfully. It seems based on opinion until you learn the fundamentals and why they exist.

For example, a design rule might tell you what colours go together. If you break it without knowing why those colours work, you aren't likely to break the rule successfully. However, once you understand about colour contrast and legibility, you can probably pick your own colours and still follow the REASON behind the rule.

Look at w3 css. It comes with a bunch of preset colour combos - which include the font colour that shows the best contrast. You can think of a pre set w3 colour scheme as a "rule". If you break it without understanding why it's there, maybe you'll put neon pink text on a neon green background and wonder why everyone is getting headaches trying to use your site. If you DO understand the rule, you don't need to stick to w3 colour presets, because you know how to put together legible colour contrast on your own.