Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

Bulma is great for starting :)

> Basic of color theory

Time for me to rant about how pointless and useless "color theory" is beyond the obvious things like red is for errors and green is for success. It's just a bunch of non-sequitors where people take random facts and then apply them after the fact on particular designs.

Things like trying to design using colors from swatches or using colors based on their position on the color wheel are examples of what not to do because the ideas behind them are often misunderstood and therefore poorly applied.

And don't even get me started on color psychology. For example, they'll take some fact like a lot of foods aren't blue or that some mould is blue and then say that's why you shouldn't use it for food related designs. Which is rubbish because you definitely want a nice blue for things like blue cheese, or for water related stuff. I could easily see someone thinking that having a picture of the ocean on a menu or part of their advertising is bad because of these silly articles even if that's their restaurant theme. It's not just about the color, but the overall design.

Since we have a lot of customers like you, we have been investing more and more in educational content about UX for non-designers. Check it out if you're interested [1]. It's all fairly new so we'd love feedback on it.

[1] https://balsamiq.com/learn/

I'm a ux designer and a professor in hci. It looks like there is still a lot of confusion between UX and UI. UX is not just what concerns the interface. UX is a process with different phases:

- an exploratory phase, where the designer interviews the stakeholders, analyzes the current product (if it is a redesign), makes a benchmark of the competing products and services;

- a research phase, where the designer involves actual or potential users to understand their needs, goals, their knowledge, their behaviors; she does interviews, observations, and uses methods like the laddering, the free listing, the card sorting, the task analysis and so on

- the raw results of the research are documented in a number of deliverables:

  * personae
  * scenarios
  * customer journeys / experience maps
  * conceptualizations
  * taxonomies and navigation trees

- the research is translated into the design of the product, producing wireframes or low fidelity prototypes, designing the macro and the micro information architecture, the interaction, the navigation; - a design system should be adopted and / or developed, identifying the components, the colors, the typography, the tone of voice - a high fidelity prototype applies the design system to the low fidelity prototipes - everything should be tested with the users, in different moments: competitive testing (to test the competitors' products), exploratory testing, confirmatory testing; prototypes should also be evaluated to verify the conformity to the standards and to the design system / style guides;

This is UX design (different experts will describe it in slightly different ways, but the structure remains the same).

I'm obviously aware that this process would be a big effort for a side project. But it's very important to keep in mind that this is the right approach, and in the long run, the process will decrease the risk of failure.

That is not color theory, at all.

You could start with the Wikipedia page to get a quick overview of what color theory really is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory

It is not the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo strawman you're ranting against. Color theory makes no subjective judgements on what colors "mean" or should be used for, but instead focuses on the visual properties and perception of color.