8 Go-To Resources About UI Components

A well-designed user interface is essential for any software from mobile to desktop and web application. The user interface provides the gateway for end-users to interact with software. It’s impossible to provide a great user experience without a good user interface, regardless of how robust your back-end performance and functionality are. Therefore, designing an interface with proper UI components is key to creating a simple and straightforward user experience. In this blog post, we will look at different UI component resources for creating different kinds of interfaces.

Where to get inspired for your next project?

You will need some ideas to get inspired regardless of the type of interface. Dribble is a dedicated community for creative professionals. There you can explore new designs and ideas, buy pre-made components, themes, and fonts by other designers, and even hire people to create your ideal interface. Dribble has a dedicated section for UI components with designs for any application. It can be used to get some ideas about creating the interface for your next project.

https://dribbble.com/tags/ui_components

How to Find the Perfect Font?

Finding the ideal font for your interface is a tedious task while finding a font with a proper commercial license can be even harder. Even though paid fonts may do the trick, they can quickly become prohibitively expensive. Font Squirrel provides a solution to this issue by providing users with a curated list of freeware fonts licensed for commercial use. On top of that, Font Squirrel provides functionality to convert your existing fronts to web-optimized versions, as well as the ability to identify fonts using an image. It allows users to quickly find the exact font type by uploading an image with the font and processing it through Font Squirrel.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/

How to Facilitate JS Charts in your Interface?

JavaScript enables users to develop dynamically updating content on their websites. D3.js allows users to create charts and graphs without relying on proprietary frameworks and fully utilize the capabilities of modern browsers. However, it can be complex to properly implement this functionality. D3.js graph gallery provides users with varying examples of different types of chart implementations with various functionality. Thus, users can easily use these examples as the base to create and embed charts in their applications.

https://www.d3-graph-gallery.com/index.html

Where to Build and Test Individual UI Components?

With various frameworks and libraries available for building user interfaces, users will have to work with different frameworks and libraries for different projects. Therefore, they will have to create different UI components that work with different frameworks. The open-source project Storybook takes a unique approach to accomplish this need by providing users with a development environment to create and test UI components. The best part of this approach is that it is compatible with a wide range of frameworks such as Vue, React, Angular to specialized frameworks like Marko, Mithril, and Preact.

https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/

Where to Get Pre-Build CSS-based UI Components?

Creating UI components from scratch will not be a feasible solution to cope with fast development schedules. Furthermore, it will become a time-consuming task when coupled with the need to manage both HTML and CSS files with each change to the interface. Tailwindcss is a utility-first CSS framework designed to facilitate rapid UI development. 

This framework eliminates the need to create custom CSS for each UI component. It allows developers to utilize pre-built CSS classes within their HTML to create these components without ever touching a custom CSS file. Tailwindcss also provides framework-specific guidelines for users to integrate it with any supported framework for creating UI components rapidly. Its support for custom styles offers developers the freedom to add their own styles and extend the user interface further.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/utility-first

How to Reuse the same Codebase for Multi-Platform Mobile Development?

The mobile market is divided between iOS and Android platforms, each providing gateway to millions of potential users. However, creating and maintaining two separate applications for both platforms will be an expensive task. The open-source project Flutter provides a solution to this problem by providing a framework to create multi-platform, natively compiled applications using a single codebase. 

Flutter not only supports mobile platforms but can also be used for desktop, web, and embedded applications, all with a single codebase. Flutter Awesome, and its complimentary awesome-flutter GitHub page acts as a starting point for users to dive into the Flutter framework by providing a curated list of Flutter libraries, tools, articles, and guides to fulfill any development need.

https://flutterawesome.com/

https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter

Can we add Animations to UI Components?

The simple answer is Yes. We can add animations to different UI components, and it can be a great way to improve the user experience. Animate.css is a cross-browser compatible CSS library dedicated to facilitating animations within web projects. Animate can be added as an npm/yarn package or directly as a stylesheet. 

This library provides a collection of ready-made animations that can be used to simply animate an object by specifying a CSS class. This simplified method for adding animations enables users to create vibrant UI elements without bogging down in creating animations from scratch. It can be used either directly with HTML elements or in combination with JavaScript to facilitate more complex functionality. 

https://animate.style/

How to Create Reusable Web Components?

Web components allow users to create standardized web components with a high level of interoperability, allowing them to be used in any HTML environment with any framework. Lit is a simple library to create performance-centric lightweight web components. There will be components like login dialogs that can be easily facilitated via a standard component for developing multiple applications. 

Lit provides all the necessary underpinning to facilitate the creation of reusable web components that are lightweight and easily rendered. The combination of Lit playground with its excellent documentation provides users with a starting point to create web components and many examples of ready-made components that can be easily adapted to any site.

https://lit.dev/playground/#sample=examples/directive-live

Ready to get started building amazing web apps with UI components?

Creating a user-friendly and functional UI is a difficult and complicated process. However, front-end frameworks, component and design libraries, and pre-made components aim to simplify this process up to some extent. All the resources mentioned above are great starting points to create different kinds of UI components and add varying functionality to user interfaces in different platforms.

Head over and check out all of the awesome UI components available in Sencha Ext JS.