Is there anything wrong with not having an eye for style?

I’ve seen a few posts that look great. I want to continue, but I’m nervous that I need a portfolio with style rather than proof that I know what I’m doing.

Is substance without style just fine for portfolio work?

TL;DR No.

That’s been my problem and it doesn’t help that people ignorant of code judge our work based on appearance in less than 2 seconds instead of code quality. Knowing that reality, look at examples of current and leading edge style, “professional” look. Learn some rules of thumb and stay in the safe zone.

  • Learn some basic typography rules.

  • Learn how to pick colors that “go” together (basic color theory). Or at least use a color palette generator like Adobe Kuler.

  • Read about Google Material which is their style rules for front-end development

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I think it depends, there’s more to web development than designing.

I’m terrible at design, and my portfolio is ugly (and unfinished).

You can focus on things that are you are better at, such as programming and logic. I have a number of varied projects that I’ve worked on other the time I promote over my terrible portfolio site. I’d rather promote all the complex problems I’ve overcome than anything that “looks nice”. I also wouldn’t apply to jobs that are design oriented, since I’m not good at those jobs, or problems.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is usually better than trying to be strong in everything :slight_smile:

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I would like to note that i do not consider myself great when it comes to styling and picking out colors and creating an overall theme that looks pleasing to the eye lol. However, it is a skill that can be improved upon.
I would suggest that wherever you go outside, look at the style and colors. All of the business that you run into on a daily basis have a certain font and color scheme. Take some time to look and observe these designs. The gym that i go to is anytime fitness, never thought that certain shades of purple, orange, and green could all go together and harmonize really well until i took time to observe. Take inspiration from what you see. :slight_smile:

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I think that in general, people don’t care about the code at all, unless they are coders. If a site looks bad, they’ll move on. However, as a web developer, the web designer should be doing all of the design work (graphics, banners, images and where they go on the page (wire-frame or hi-res image)). Your task is to write the code to put all of those elements where the designer put them in their mock-up.

Maybe you could develop a big, bold, catchy slogan, “Crap Designer BRILLIANT Developer!” for example.

For your portfolio, I see nothing wrong with asking someone to provide a design as a wire-frame and hig-res image, and select the images and colour palette for you to code the structure. I wonder how many people actually took their own photos and created their own graphics for their portfolios and projects.

What makes a good-looking website anyway? These days, I’ve seen landing pages that are full-screen photos with a click to read more button. Where’s the design in that? It’s just a photo and a button! Maybe that is a point; lazy pages for lazy readers perhaps.

Some people have mentioned colour schemes. Yeah, we don’t want to make our visitors suffer clash of the colour titans! This search has some nice examples:
https://www.qwant.com/?q=web%20colour%20schemes&t=web

Look at nature, which colours seem to look nice together, which ones contrast, why? Danger? Attraction?

Thinking of design structure, you could visit one of those site builder websites and have a look at their templates. From there, you can recreate the general design structure.

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