Practical UI Details

As Steve Schoger, designer and author of Refactoring UI, puts it, "Making [website] components look well designed can be broken down into a few discrete choices". Defining a color scheme, sizing system, and more for common components will save you time and standardize your output. Sometimes the difference between something looking "off" and looking "right" can be subtle, and together these details make a design feel great. Many of the following examples come from tweets by Schoger.

• Color icons slightly lighter than labels

  If you have icons next to labels, you can color them slightly lighter than the text that goes with them. This will make the most important info (the label) stand out.

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• Add a subtle shadow to white text on a bright background

  If you need to use a bright background color with white text you can give the text a nice subtle shadow to make it more readable. Here we use text-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);

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• Shift buttons .5 px for a nice hover effect

  In addition to this effect, you can increase the size of the element's shadow to give the effect of "lifting up". This is an effect used by Stripe.

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• Floating button

  Here's another example of an element that Stripe uses. The box-shadow on these buttons is complex, which adds nicely to the effect: 4px 4px 16px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);

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• Give your box shadow a slight vertical offset

  This will give cards, boxes, or any other element a more natural on the page.

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• Align icons and headers neatly

  If text is aligned properly (e.g. on the same line as the icons, or images), the text will be much easier for the user to read.

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• Pure grey text can look "off" on a colored background

  Instead of using grey text, saturate your text with the same hue as the background, or use rgba with a lowered opacity to make the color of the text blend with the background.

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• Use an icon instead of the standard bullet in unordered lists

  Using icons such as arrows or checkmarks will give more life to otherwise boring unordered lists.

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• Use a hint of color at the top of your hero

  This can bring liveliness to your design, complementing the accent color of your website. 4px - 6px is enough.

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• Add a gradient border to modals or panels

  Similar to the last tip, this will also work great in modals or panels. You can even use a two color gradient to make it look even better.

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• Adjust hue for nice gradients

  When you use a gradient, in a button for example, change the hue to give a more "vivid" look.

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• Use contrast between two adjacent boxes instead of a line

  Using two slightly contrasted colors instead of using a line will be more pleasing to the eye and look more clean.

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• Use color and weight to create typographic hierarchy

  Not only using weight is enough, when you use color you have a well defined hierarchy between the title and the descrpition.

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• When in doubt, 16px font size with 1.5 line height looks nice for body text

  Also, you can use a dark shade of gray instead of black to ease the look for the user (instead of using high contrast black and white).

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• Increase your letter spacing in all-caps text

  This will give the text some space to breath and will make it easier to read for the user. The first line below uses letter-spacing: 1.3px;, the rest letter-spacing: -0.03px;

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• Use keylines to group similar content together

  This will make the content appear connected, and it will be easier for the user to understand it.

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• Create a great hero banner with blend-mode: multiply

  Using blend-mode with a desaturated photo and a background color gives a nice contrast to your hero banner with white text.

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• Overlap elements to create depth

  This will also encourage users to scroll and reveal the rest of the content.

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• Create hierarchy for your buttons

  Your primary action button should stand out more than secondary/danger buttons.

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• Don't use bold color for negative action if it's not the main action

  This may confuse the users, instead use a subtle gray or light color.

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• However, use red if you are confirming a high severity action

  If you don't use a color like red for confirming a high severity action, a user may think there's no danger in it.

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• Make the border of buttons lighter than the text

  This will make them stand out.

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• Instead of borders, use background colors

  Too many borders can make a piece of UI look busy. Instead, use background colors to visually separate elements and use increased spacing between rows.

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• Simple breadcrumbs

  Nice and legible navigation element.