The UI

Part of this parent blogpost.

This is the layer responsible for how the User Interface looks like. How ingenious ? Let me rephrase , a UI developer converts the outputs from a UX/UI designer into real code and this “real code” is the UI layer.

Checkout “UX designer ? UI designer ? UI Developer ? WTH !!” if you want more clarity on what exactly UI/UX designers/developers do.

Let’s look into the skills required for being able to create the UI layer in a good efficient way.

• HTML : This is of course a basic requirement to be able to develop UI. One should know all the basic markups in the language and the knowledge gets better with time. You wont need dedicated time to learn HTML in my opinion. You learn it with time.
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language.
• PreCompilers: These allow you to add more functionality to the CSS. What this means is that you can use a styling language like a programming language (using methods and variables, its all there). Some popular pre-compilers right now are SASS, LESS and Stylus.
• UI Frameworks: In todays era , where the web is accessed from small , medium and large devices, it is necessary that the website looks good on all of them without having to write totally separate code for each one. This can be done using media-queries. Using media queries for large applications can become cumbersome. Hence we need some sort of UI frameworks which does the job of managing all the stuff that media queries do for us. Some of the most popular frameworks used are Bootstrap, Foundation, Bourbon W Neat and Gumby.

Part of this parent blogpost.