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Polishing a UI Tips and Tools
Polishing up the user interface of your application involves many components but should start with the following enhancements:
- Pick a Vibrant Color Scheme - Pick a primary color and a secondary color for coloring your app using a sensible color scheme.
- Use Proper Icons and Colorful Images - Use images, icons and backgrounds for your UIs leveraging resources like IconFinder, iconmonstr, NounProject, flickr and Google Image Search to locate relevant assets. Adhere carefully to the iconography style guidelines for Android
- Review Typography - Check out the typography guide to understand the common font types for Android apps and default type colors and sizes. See the calligraphy library for each custom fonts.
- Apply backgrounds and borders to views and layouts - Use shape and layer drawables cliffnotes to create colorful backgrounds and borders to your buttons, listviews, and other views.
- Improve ActionBar and Navigation Appearance - Review our style guides for the ActionBar and ActionBar Tabs guide. See generators linked in next section.
- Follow Android UI Standards - Use common navigation styles and proper app guidelines and be sure to design for Android.
- Implement Intermediate UI Elements - Make sure to add progress bars when loading, along with placeholders for images and empty states for when there's no content.
Simple guide for improving the UI for any application including links to tools:
- Catchy Title - Pick a creative single word name for your application
- Launcher Icon - Select a pleasant launcher icon (create a launcher icon and update in manifest)
- Design Guidelines - Review these design cliffnotes for an overview of design guidelines and patterns.
- Core Principles - Core motivating principles of Android UI
- Pure Android - Simple guidelines for following Android standards
- App Structure - Guidelines for general app structure
- Benchmarking - Check out the following sites for looking at how popular apps look and feel
- Styling with Generators
- Style ActionBar - Customize the ActionBar with this generator, copy over the files, and apply the theme.
- Style Views - Customize the View control colors using the Holo Colors Generator
- Style Buttons - Customize the buttons using the Button Style Generator
Additional reading:
- Review the screen styling FAQ.
- Review the complete drawables cliffnotes
- Review the styles and themes cliffnotes
- Review our styling the ActionBar guide
- Review our styling tabs guide
The original gist source for the page can be found here.
Created by CodePath with much help from the community. Contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required. You are free to remix and reuse, as long as you attribute and use a similar license.
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