“Design works like magic, transforming ideas into experiences that are both beautiful and simple..” The purpose of UI/UX design is to provide people with interfaces and experiences that are visually appealing, and simple to use and help them reach their goals. If the design is not done properly, the user might get confused while using the app, or he might face certain other problems too, which will undoubtedly make him dislike it. Hence, the importance of UI/UX design increases to create a smooth, enjoyable, and meaningful experience for the user.
Streamline UI/UX Design with Frameworks
What are frameworks?
Have you ever played with LEGO? If yes, then you can easily relate. Like in a LEGO box, you get these small pieces and all you have to do is to put together those pieces and make something awesome, say a castle or a spaceship. Similarly, you have frameworks, that are nothing but small pieces of pre-built components that you add to your website or app to make it more pleasing.
These frameworks provide a structured foundation that helps streamline the design process by offering ready-to-use elements such as buttons, layouts, typography, and color schemes.
Let us get acquainted with some very famous frameworks:
CSS Frameworks:
- Bootstrap: This is one of the most widely used CSS frameworks that provides a huge collection of pre-built components, responsive grid systems, and styles to create consistent and mobile-friendly web designs.
- Foundation: Similar to Bootstrap, Foundation offers a responsive front-end framework with customizable components, a grid system, and various styling options for building websites and web applications.
- Bulma: A modern CSS framework based on Flexbox, that offers a clean structure with easy-to-use components to build responsive web designs.
- Tailwind CSS: Unlike traditional CSS frameworks, Tailwind provides small pre-made components that developers can combine together to make a great looking design.
JavaScript Frameworks:
- Material UI: This is the most popular React UI framework (you can term it as the first choice of react developers). It provides a set of ready-to-use components following the material design principles and modern design.
- Semantic UI: A user-friendly framework for building responsive layouts with a variety of UI components using natural language principles. It’s available for both React and other JavaScript environments.
- Ant Design: This is a box of stylish tools for react that contains wide range of components with modern design.
- Vue Material: This is a toolkit for vue.js that bring material design to life. It gives you ready to use components that you can customize the way you like.
Full-fledged JavaScript Frameworks/Libraries:
- React: It a popular JS library developed by Facebook for building UIs and majorly known for its component based architecture, efficient rendering, virtual DOM ,state managements and more.
- Angular: It is a comprehensive framework developed by Google. It provides structured approach for building applications.
- Vue.js: It is known for its simplicity and flexibility and it also offers a component based architecture.
- Next.js: This is a react framework that is known for its flexibility and more importantly its performance. It allows Server side rendering.
- Three.js: This is a less known but powerful JS library that is known for creating and displaying 3D graphics in web pages. You must have seen some websites with 3D effects, they are developed using three.js.
There are lot more other than these, but these frameworks are the most widely used and have the largest community support.
Streamlining the Design Process
Sometimes, the mind get stuck when we see a complete white board in front of us. Where to start? What to make? But what if we already had a design and all we have to do is to customize that design a bit a make it look the way we want (Like in examinations, framing an answer seems easy when we know the first line).
In simple words you can say that, simplifying the process of designing, this is what the frameworks do, but how?
These are pre-coded components that the user can easily grab and put in their website or app. Think of it as having a kit with pre-designed parts—buttons, menus, layouts, and more—that designers can use and customize according to their specific project needs.
Let us see a scenario, say Person 1 and Person 2 are designing an e-commerce website. Person 1 chooses to design the entire website from scratch, while Person 2 chooses the path of frameworks and decides to pick up a template of the landing page from Tailwind CSS and do some customization on that. After 1 day, Person 1 is still busy in designing the navbar while Person 2 is about to complete the footer. That’s how frameworks streamline the process of designing.
These frameworks offer you pre-built buttons, forms, navbar, footer, call to action, pricing page and a lot more. I myself created an entire landing page of an e-commerce platform in less than 3 days using the Tailwind UI components. Not only this, but the tension of creating responsiveness, i.e. creating one layout for the desktop, one for the mobile and other laptop is no longer a tension when you work with frameworks. These frameworks are fully responsive and the designer/developer does not have to work extra to create different designs for different layouts.
Bonus
Framework like Material UI (MUI) is currently trending and is in demand by the companies because of its react ecosystem and comprehensive components library.
A less popular open-source website namely uiverse.io is like a boon for developers and designers. These website is full of unimaginable components. This website has a huge collection of epicly designed components like buttons, forms, loaders, checkboxes and more with their code also. You will surely love it !
If you are short of time and want to create a landing page, use the tailwind CSS UI to create a great looking modern design within a short period of time.
Conclusion
In the world of UI/UX design, frameworks are the unsung heroes, enabling designers and developers to craft seamless and visually appealing user experiences. The beauty of these frameworks is their ability to reduce the complex process of design to a simple undertaking.