UI Design and Neumorphism in Power BI
Designing great user interfaces in Power BI is one way to increase use and adoption. Anything that makes the experience more intuitive or enjoyable might be the difference between all your hard work on a backend model seeing the light of day vs. sitting on the shelf. There are many different paths to go down in terms of design, with some great examples already out on the web — such as how to achieve shadowing/visual framing, using just objects built in PowerPoint.
Given the fact that many styling concepts boil down to shapes, colors, and shadows used behind other text or visual elements — the possibilities are certainly endless.
One area where we can gain inspiration is web design trends. Certain aspects of web design may be possible to implement in Power BI reports. In this post, I’ll walk through an example of how to implement a recent trend in Web UI design (Neumorphism) in Power BI.
Background
Before we start down the implementation details, what is Neumorphism? It’s also known as Soft UI. The idea is — rather than giving objects on a page a flat appearance…our goal here will be to achieve an almost raised plastic look, where visual boxes have some depth around them. This is similar to the shadowing effect you see in PowerPoint, with a few caveats:
- We use two shadows, a lighter and darker colored shadow to achieve the desired visual appearance.
- The background of our visual matches the background of our page…
