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Designing Apps: 5 Methods to improve your workflow

Designing apps can be challenging if you don’t have a design background. Many of you who read my blog are great at writing code, but making that perfect design is a different challenge.

For my From Side Project to Going Indie Course, I invited my good friend Hidde van der Ploeg to give a guest lecture on app design. In this hour-long episode, he shares his Indie journey and several techniques, lessons, and tips for making excellent design implementations. In this article, I’ll share five methods that can help you improve your design workflow.

1. The Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio is one of the methods shared by Hidde and really opened my eyes: I had no idea this exists. He recommends watching this in-depth video on The Golden Ratio, but here’s Hidde explaining the basic idea of this ratio:

The Golden Ratio can help you create better designs.

Just like with coding, there are several rules to follow when designing your app. As long as you follow these, you’ll end up with an at least acceptable design implementation which can be a good starting foundation.

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2. The Power of Spacing

When you put a lot of design elements in a single page close to each other, you’ll immeditiately get a feeling of a bad design. Something doesn’t feel right, but you might not always know what’s causing it. Chances are high that it’s caused by lack of spacing and as a result, lack of hierarchy.

Create visual hierarchy by applying spacing and reducing the number of elements on screen.

3. Designing with SwiftUI

Designing apps in Sketch or Figma is great, but it always requires you to repeat all steps when actually building the app. You might realize during coding that a certain design idea doesn’t work out as expected and you need to get back to the drawing board. At the same time, when you change something in code, you need to change it in your design file too to ensure everything remains in sync.

Much better would be to design your apps with SwiftUI. Using SwiftUI previews you can validate views in different states and directly play around with interactive components. You’ll also benefit from system components at hand and once you’re happy with the design, you can directly start connecting business logic to make it all work in production.

4. From gray to vibrant personality

When you’re designing apps, you’re likely focusing on the app’s functionality at first to validate the concept. Once you know things are working as expected, you’ll try to transform the basic app into a visual appealing application with a vibrant personality. Hidde shares how he starts and transforms a design:

Why you shouldn’t dive directly into code and why you should first make it work, then make it shine.

5. Save designs you love along the way

Using system components in app design only brings you so far when designing apps, you also want to add that personal touch. Being able to do so requires experience and takes time, but by saving designs you like along the way, you’re able to create your personal source of inspiration. I personally love using Dribbble for this, but a tool like Pinterest could work as well.

How to make your designs stand out?

Listen to the full episode

These 5 methods are just a small piece of all the tips and experiences shared by Hidde in an hour long episode. He shares how he transformed from being a designer to becoming a full-time indie developer who builds his own apps. You’ll also learn how he designs his apps, why he thinks you’re not lonely as an indie dev, and how designers can stay inspired while working on personal projects only.

Are you excited to learn more from Hidde’s experience? Go to going-indie.com to take the course with an early-bird 20% discount. You’ll find the guest lecture in Module 4, episode 6.

Conclusion

Designing apps can be challenging as developers without design experience, but using several methods and learning from Hidde’s experience, you’ll be able get a long way. Just like with coding, design comes with rules of thumb that help to create a basic design that looks good enough to start with.

If you like to improve your workflow, even more, check out the workflow category page. Feel free to contact me or tweet to me on Twitter if you have any additional tips or feedback.

Thanks!

 
Antoine van der Lee

Written by

Antoine van der Lee

iOS Developer since 2010, former Staff iOS Engineer at WeTransfer and currently full-time Indie Developer & Founder at SwiftLee. Writing a new blog post every week related to Swift, iOS and Xcode. Regular speaker and workshop host.

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