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Polishing a UI Tips and Tools

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Nathan Esquenazi edited this page Mar 1, 2015 · 35 revisions

Overview

Building beautiful Android apps starts with understanding how to approach building a delightful UI and each of the components that contributes:

design  design  design

Polishing up the user interface of your application starts with the following enhancements:

  1. Pick a Vibrant Color Scheme - Pick a primary color and a secondary color for coloring your app using a sensible color scheme.
  2. Use Proper Icons and Colorful Images - Use images, icons and backgrounds for your UIs leveraging resources like MaterialDesignIcons, IconFinder, iconmonstr, NounProject, flickr and Google Image Search to locate relevant assets. Adhere carefully to the iconography style guidelines for Android
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Improve ActionBar and Navigation Appearance - Review our style guides for the ActionBar and ActionBar Tabs guide. See generators linked in next section.
  6. Follow Android UI Standards - Use common navigation styles and proper app guidelines and be sure to design for Android.
  7. 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.

Tips and Tools

Simple guide for improving the UI for any application including links to tools:

  1. Catchy Title - Pick a creative single word name for your application
  2. Launcher Icon - Select a pleasant launcher icon (create a launcher icon and update in manifest)
  3. Design Guidelines - Review these design cliffnotes for an overview of design guidelines and patterns.
  1. Benchmarking - Check out the following sites for looking at how popular apps look and feel
  2. Styling with Generators

Further Reading

Additional reading:

The original gist source for the page can be found here.

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