Great UI design is hard.

But decent UI design is easy.

Most developers SUCK at design. They suck because they don't know the secret ingredient... Theft.

The best way to make sure your UI doesn't look like it was built by a 7th grader with a Weebly subscription is to STEAL designs from other apps. And by steal I mean really really rob them blind, take everything you can: fonts, hex codes, border radiuses, the copper wires from the walls in their house.

But! There is one rule: Steal from apps outside of your market, not from your competitors.

If you steal from a competitor, you will might get called out, but more importantly, you won't learn anything.

When you lift from a website or app that's completely unrelated to yours you won't be able to copy their design exactly. You'll be forced to think: If the designer of this app built the component I need, what would it look like? Where would they put it? How would it facilitate the user journey? Then, all of a sudden, you're no longer stealing. And this is where the learning happens.

After repeating this process in a few different projects, you begin to develop a lil something called design sense.

Will this strategy enable you to reach the level of the Figma wielding - late sipping - screenshot posting designers you see on your Twitter feed? Probably not.

But at least when someone opens your app, they won't immediately know it was designed by a backend engineer.

If you do this effectively

• no one will know that you stole
• you will become a better designer