Tailwind, Have I switched?

I’ve never been much of a designer. I know what I like, and I can recreate any design a designer passes my way. However, producing anything original is incredibly hard.

I switched to Bootstrap many years ago. I switched because I needed a way to solve this problem, Bootstrap made it easy to create what I wanted. Additionally, it would also look OK – typically much better than ok.

Bootstrap sites typically look the same and before I go on, I don’t necessarily consider that a “bad thing”. The problem arises when you don’t want everything to look the same. Customisation is possible with Bootstrap, particularly version 5. However, it gets complicated quickly.

I’ve released three Apps in the last year. Two game scorers for Yahtzee and Yatzy and Budget, a free open-source budgeting App. The Apps all look ‘similar’, this isn’t necessary a problem because they all belong to the Costs to Expect service so it should be obvious that they belong to the same brand. However, I wanted something different for Budget Pro, an evolution of Budget.

Why not Bootstrap?

Budget Pro belongs to the same family as all the Apps I released this year but being the paid version, I wanted to differentiate it from Budget and give it a sharpened look. Due to its features, it will also have a more complex UI than Budget. As I was thinking about how to ‘improve’ the Budget design I decided to give Tailwind a go as everything I’ve seen of it has impressed me, particularly Tailwind UI.

Why Tailwind?

Two things pushed me over the edge. Firstly. Tailwind UI, having an extensive library of components to build with and from made it easy to get started and start building up ideas. Secondly, the standalone cli; I don’t want or need any additional dependencies and prefer vanilla JavaScript over any front-end toolchains.

I’m only a little way into my journey with Tailwind but so far, I’m loving it. Yes, you end up with lots of classes in the HTML. However, you know what each of them do based on the name and I create components to reduce duplication anyway.

We’ll see if the honeymoon continues as I move away from landing and content pages. It is when you get into the nitty gritty of creating the meat of Budget Pro things might go south.

I ‘ll make sure to post a Tailwind update when I am further into the development of Budget Pro.