Developing a beautiful user interface from scratch is never easy. It takes a substantial amount of tinkering and artistic flair to create anything comparable to the modern interfaces you get out of the box with web templates.
Unfortunately using a template isn’t always an option and sometimes you just have to code the frontend yourself. It is all too common in these situations that technically excellent work is let down by aesthetics. As long as things are working, users rarely have an appreciation for the technical complexities and instead judge your work based entirely on what they can see.
Demoralising as this sounds, all is not lost! Many amazing tools exist to help developers easily add stunning aesthetics to their frontend.
unDraw.co is my go to site when I need a complimentary images in my designs. The project is entirely open-source and provides a catalog of searchable illustrations and handcrafts all in a consistent style.
Something I love about this site is that ever image has a primary colour that is controlled by a colour picker. This allows you to customise the images with a colour of your choice making them highly adaptable to any design.
unDraw allows you to download the images as either a SVG or PNG. SVGs are brilliant for responsive web content as they do not change quality when rendered at different sizes and can be easily modified with common graphic design software.
When I want to create interesting background images for sections of my site I love to use haiku.app. This tool has some amazing features for creating all sorts of dynamically generated backgrounds that you can download as either a SVG or PNG.
You can sign-up for free and get access to a large range of background types. Each type you can customise with different colours and other properties to make a unique background.
There are many other free SVG background generating tools out there, however I mainly use Haikei.app because of the wide variety of backgrounds you can create. Nonetheless some noteworthy mentions include:
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