Unfortunately, there's one problem I'm running into. That being, my art/design skills are basically nonexistent. Regardless of how many attempts I make at designing websites or apps, design just does not come naturally at all, and even thinking of how to lay out a UI feels impossible without outright copying others.
So how do you create a site with no design skills at all? The development side of things isn't really an issue, and I'm willing to learn whatever tech is needed for that side of things, but actually designing it is proving a challenge. I also don't really have any designer friends willing to work for free/cheap, so I'm not sure who to call on here.
What do other non artistic developers at Hacker News do for personal site and portfolio designs?
Provide links to your Github, project descriptions and screenshots if you can, code snippets, open source projects, whatever...
But hell, I'm a frontend dev with a little bit of design/graphics/UX experience and I still just send unformatted PDFs full of crap and don't have any personal website. I've never seen another dev with a portfolio. If you can build anything, even just a standard Tailwind/Bootstrap lookalike, you're fine.
Part of the reason I don't want to put up such a site is that the technologies involved change so fast, and are often so controversial, that it would take way too much upkeep. I don't want some employer to dig into the source and argue with me about why I chose this bundler or that framework or this CSS ... usually those choices are team/project-specific anyway and not up to me. By choosing one or another for my personal site, it makes it seem like I have a preference, when that's not necessarily the case.
This is a good cheap book for some basic guidelines if you really want to try to DIY something as opposed to using an existing template: https://www.refactoringui.com/
https://tailwindcss.com is known for utility-class based styling, but it's also a nice-looking design system.
In fact, they wrote a book: https://www.refactoringui.com
> Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer.
> Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.
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https://clarity.design gives you:
- A nice-looking default/base design (basic responsive layout, styling, sizes, colors, icons, (light/dark) themes...)
- Pretty comprehensive UX guidelines (like when to use a snackbar vs alert vs toast vs banner vs modal[1])
- Framework agnostic web components (there is a slight bias towards Angular and even React/Vue)
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While not as comprehensive, https://picocss.com is my default go-to for giving my sites/apps nice-looking default styling with almost no work. Pico CSS is more of a semantic CSS library, but it is also a bit of a design system.
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https://getbootstrap.com is probably one of the most used design systems.
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That being said, I don't think you need a portfolio. It might help, but I don't know anyone with a public portfolio.
This wouldn't fly for a designer or frontend specialist of course, but for developers working in other areas I think it works pretty well. Certainly HN appreciates a simple website.
Also, as others have said I wouldn't sweat the portfolio too much. I personally _have_ always had one, but I'm not sure it's ever helped me - I don't recall an interviewer ever mentioning it or any of its contents (same goes for GitHub/similar).
[1] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL/hash#ex...
You don’t need anything unique or special, just a basic layout that wouldn’t be distractingly bad
Copy others then. Nobody will care and engineering is the art of not reinventing the wheel. Good luck.
then focus on functionality such as showcasing crud, use of different databases, etc etc.