I am looking to create an app but have a couple of concerns before I dive in.
With other tools on the market such as Webflow, Wordpress, etc. no-code beautiful websites are possible. Obviously (for now), these are not solutions geared towards SaaS web apps per say.
My concern is (and this may be due to the UI/UX of current Bubble) that truly beautiful websites may not be possible and that my app would feel outdated.
Is this the case and if not, is there anyone that can link or showcase a beautiful Bubble site?
If this is the case than what have you done to successfully build a beautiful web app?
Use Bubble as a back-end and another no-code app as a front-end?
Thank you for the link but I have viewed most of the those sites and some are good but none strike me as truly beautiful. Was hoping that the community could provide some inspiration.
Okay Iām not finding the responses to this question helpful so Iāll give it a shot.
It is possible to do beautiful designs with Bubble but itās much much harder to do than other competitors you mentioned. Trust me I have been designing websites since 1998, I used Wordpress extensively, made themes for it etc.
The difficulty in bubble is not because you donāt have the tools. You certainly do. In fact styling common elements is easy and the allowable design edits you can make certainly cover most of what you need. Not to mention there are a ton of web fonts to choose from.
The difficulty is in the fact that this is a very open ended no code tool and someone who is not a designer canāt be expected to produce good designs out of the box without help. Wordpress for instance can be super ugly too, and in the beginning a lot of themes were. It changed significantly when people started selling premium themes and saw they could make money out of it. Now really beautiful Wordpress themes are abundant.
You can take a look at the templates section for bubble and see that many (if not most) are well designed to an extent but as soon as you try to navigate around you see they are not that great. Over-reliance on things like rounding, badly done shadows, poor choice of typography etc (these are my own opinions, no offense to the hard working teams that built them). This is because bubble is a relatively small community and making money from templates is not yet easy, it does not draw a lot of talent (in fact only a handful of producers are responsible for most of the templates here). The makers of the templates canāt afford to make them super cheap because they wonāt be able to sell in large quantities, so there is a supply/demand issue here.
In short if you are not designer you canāt easily by yourself make beautiful web pages in bubble but itās not because itās an inferior product, in fact there is no match for the logic that bubble gives you. Itās because you need affordable templates from designers, and there is not a significant buyer base to motivate more talented people to do it. I think bubble should take a look at their template offerings and do something about it. Maybe hire full time designers that can truly showcase what it can do and offer those templates for free. This will increase adoption and expand the market for other people to build more templates etc.
@galileilabs Iām baffled by your perspective here. You acknowledge that Bubble has the requisite tools for beautiful design, which was the crux of your original question. But then your issue seems to be around requiring assistance to get to a desired level of quality. In addition, you also seem perturbed by the lack of templates (quantity and quality).
Iām no designer. In fact Iām light years from being one. Iām also no programmer. Yet Bubbleās vast capabilities allow me to build highly functioning applications that look decent without either skillset. However, if I needed to, I can certainly see incredible scope for beautifying my apps within the platform, either through design assistance or my own research and grind.
I see your point, let me clarify a bit. What Iām saying is that making beautiful websites requires really good templates and you get really good templates when there is a very large community willing to pay for them so a lot of designers are attracted to the prospect of making beautiful templates. Bubble needs a better template ecosystem.
Iām all in favor of making useful comments that our community members can use and answer their question. If you feel strongly about this please share with the OP some websites you are thinking or templates that you think are beautiful so they can find something useful as their next step and adopt the platform. I have two decades of experience building web applications and Iām sharing my opinion.
Thanks for the response and clarification @galileilabs. MHO is that you donāt necessarily need beautiful templates to build beautiful sites. But where I can agree is that you need templates if your business model is to create a high number of beautiful sites. Iām on the opposite end of the spectrum where I have been focusing on one site for an extended period. Therefore the extent of the beauty of that one site is, quite literally, in my hands. I know there are dozens of tweaks I can make to beautify the app, but balance and focus takes priority.
I do have more of a design background and am very familiar with Wordpress and using blocks, Elementor, etc. and making some pretty nice websites from my previous startup.
Wordpress is very mature at this point and once you spend the time with it you can do some pretty beautiful things. I know Bubble is still coming up and here there is possibly the editor redesign coming in the summer.
All-in-all, I want to build an app and feel Bubble is kind of like Wordpress for web apps and glad to hear good things are possible pertaining to design. Thank you all!
I think the point that the poster is getting at is that Bubble was created a number of years ago, before tools like Webflow came onto the scene (or in a major way). Currently, making a beautiful site on Bubble is possible, but depending on your definition of beautiful, it could be potentially much harder than other tools like Webflow.
I think a good example of this is the responsive system of Bubbles. Yes it works, but itās unclear how it works, and making clear tweaks to design elements is difficult. If you spend a few moments in Webflow youāll see quickly why itās the leading no-code website builder.
That said, where Webflow doesnāt shine so bright- bubble takes the clear lead. You canāt currently build APPLICATIONS on webflow. You are starting to get close, but the saw way that Bubble is clumsy and difficult when it comes to making something universally beautiful and accessible (just have a look at the animation tools Webflow offers) you will also have a very difficult time building something that is nearly as powerful in terms of being an application on webflow.
Itās still very much apples vs oranges at the moment. It would be nice to have the best of both worlds, but not just yet.
I have worked with bleeding edge designers and some of the things they come up with are probably not possible or at least extremely difficult on bubble such as these.
Bubbles editor is fine for creating app interfaces (like Mailchimp after youāve logged in) but there are definitely limitations. As someone who designs apps/sites full-time (designing apps for Google, adidas, yada yada) I almost always run into limitations with Bubbles editor, often related to alignment, responsiveness, grids, spacing and variable widths of elements. But, the Bubble editor does provide a very visual way of building ā it almost feels like working in Sketch ā which is pretty great.
Because of those limitations I just mentioned it will be quite tricky (but not necessarily impossible) to create those beautiful looking landing pages. I would suggest creating your landing pages using WordPress / HTML and the app/SaaS-part of your business with Bubble.
By the way: There should be a big Bubble Editor update coming āsoonā.
Yeah, the landing pages are one thing but for the ones I posed even their SaaS app once logged in is striking and well designed. Obviously, not tons of animation, etc. going on as that would hit performance; even more so with a lot of users.
I just want my app to be fun to look and use.
Does Bubble have the ability to do ādark themesā for apps?
