
Ask HN: Building an MVP without a designer in 2017? - Narzerus
For a developer building an MVP, what tools do you recommend to use for a project, without a designer?
- App is not a throw-away project, can be incremented into a professional, beautiful app
- No designer available as stated above
- A designer WILL be hired in the future<p>The only options I can think of:
- Bootstrap &#x2F; Semantic-ui (Can these be customized and used for years ahead or do they require extirpation)
- Copy other designs and pray your code won&#x27;t be to hard to turn into a great design in the future
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gls2ro
You are probably asking what frameworks to use. But I suggest you should first
use Sketchapp or Adobe Experience Design (at least these two I used and liked
a lot).

They allow you to do some UI mocks/basic design with very little effort.

You can find and import in them Boostrap templates providing you with all the
elements you need. Then the next step I suggest to do is to pick the basic
colors you want to use for normal text, action buttons ... This way you will
make sure that in your app you will use only those colors providing a
consistent color scheme.

And then you can start to design your interface. Both apps provide simple
tools to use and with very little learning curve for doing simple design.

For me (even if I am not a designer) doing this helps me focus on
understanding how the elements that I want to build integrate with each other
on UI side. And also forces me to focus on using the same elements and the
same colors.

For both apps you can also find a lot of free designs provided by various
authors from which you can inspire.

You can also browse [https://dribbble.com](https://dribbble.com) or
[https://www.behance.net](https://www.behance.net) to be inspired by designs
that you like.

~~~
iDemonix
I really struggle to design things in a design app. If I have to design
something with Bootstrap I just browse for a bit of inspiration on Dribbble
then start coding.

I'd love to be able to design things in PS or Sketch but I find it takes 5x as
long as it'd take me to make something by hand.

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ninjaofawesome
As a front end developer, I would say if you need an MVP to get out the door
and you've got a bunch of plates in the air, then yes, Bootstrap (and also
Font Awesome!) works just fine for all the things that you don't really care
to worry about at the present moment. Its also easy enough to remove if you do
eventually bring in a UX person or a designer to refine things.

That being said, the little things that you can do make a huge difference
between a site that looks like its made with bootstrap vs a site that has a
bit more going on under the design hood. Pay a bit of attention to your fonts
and line heights, add in -webkit-font-smoothing, and lock down your colors
before you start (e.g. black, white, brand colors, grays, etc.) Consistency
will make your life so much easier to get that UI looking amazing, and it
takes about 15 minutes or less to write down some variables (assuming you're
using a CSS preprocessor). Also, optimize your assets (images, etc) and make
sure you have fallbacks if something doesn't load fast.

Lastly, make sure you know what you (roughly) want your app to look like on
mobile, tablet and desktop before just diving in to Bootstrap- even just
roughly sketching out boxes on paper helps me sometimes with that. I like to
use the Chrome emulator for a rough idea of any device as I work on phone,
tablet and desktop in either orientation as well.

All in all, what I've described you can easily implement in a a few hours to a
few days (depending on the complexity of your site) and makes a huge
difference. Once you're making millions, you can hire a great designer to push
your site to the next level!

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alaskamiller
Buy an UI. I've been building digital stuff for twenty years. In the end, just
buy an UI with the tech stack you're familiar with. Themeforest, CodeCanyon,
whatever. Especially if it's a enterprise dashboard/admin tool. Just buy the
most well built and most contributed to UI and master it so that you can re-
deploy it over and over again. You've got more important things to do.

~~~
rayj
Yes. I did this for my last client, much easier.

------
JeffreyKaine
Bootstrap with material design is my suggestion here. Material is versatile
enough for both iOS and Android, and it translates decently well to web. The
color palette and font stack are both easy to work with.

[https://mdbootstrap.com/material-design-for-
bootstrap/](https://mdbootstrap.com/material-design-for-bootstrap/)

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dyeje
If you're going to hire a designer in the future, then just use Bootstrap for
now.

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tbird007
You could check html5up for free templates to start with.

