5 Power Apps Gallery Design UX Tips

An app built with Power Apps can look amazing if you have a strong understanding of design principles and UI UX skills. Most citizen developers don’t. And that’s OK, neither did I when I started building Power Apps. But what I want everyone to know is you can make great designs on this platform if you learn the right skills. In this article, I’ll show you how create an awesome looking gallery screen using 5 simple Power Apps design tips.

Table Of Contents:
1. High Quality SVG Background
2. UX Cards With Drop Shadows
3. Text Hierarchy Using Size, Color & Font Weight
4. Custom SVG Icons
5. Brightly Colored Item Status Dots

Introduction: The Gallery Screen

In this tutorial, our goal will be to build the gallery shown below.

1. High Quality SVG Background

I enjoy using SVG images as the backgrounds for my apps for two reasons. Number one, SVG images are high-quality at any screen size. Number two, their patterns give users something more visually interesting to look at than a solid color background. So what is the best website to find cool backgrounds? It’s the aptly named SVGBackgrounds.com. 😉

My buddy Tim Shaw gets full credit for showing me this awesome Power Apps design tip!

There are several free SVG backgrounds to choose from. I decided to use Abstract Envelope for my app with the colors #3265AA, #44A4FF, #46EEFF. Once you’ve found picked your background, click the export icon to get the image file.

Then select Download SVG.

Go to Power Apps studio and create a new app from blank. Upload the SVG image file using the Media menu.

Set the BackgroundImage property of the screen to the name of the SVG image.

2. UX Cards With Drop Shadows

A UX card is a container that shows a few short, related pieces of information about a gallery item. Don’t make UX cards look that flat and boring. Make them look cool using drop shadows. 😎

Insert a blank vertical gallery onto the screen and apply the following properties to these values.

Height: App.Height
Items: Sequence(12)
ShowScrollbar: false
TemplateFill: Transparent
TemplatePadding: 0
TemplateSize: 140
Width: App.Width
X: 0
Y: 0

Then create an HTML Text control inside the gallery to use as the card.

Set the height and width properties of the HTML text control to fill the entire gallery row.

Height: Parent.TemplateHeight
Width: Parent.TemplateWidth
X: 0
Y: 0

Then set the HtmlText property to this code. It uses inline CSS to create the UX card with a drop shadow.

"<div style=""margin: 12px 10px 8px 10px; width: "&(Self.Width-31)&"px; height: "&(Self.Height-31)&"px; background-color: white; box-shadow: 0 4px 8px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.2); border-radius:5px""></div>"

It really looks amazing doesn’t it? I did not come up with this code on my own. I pieced it together by looking at examples from Geetha Silvasailam, W3 Schools and making adjustments until it looked great.

3. Text Hierarchy Using Size, Color & Font Weight

I’m no graphic designer, but I do know that establishing a typographic hierarchy is important when designing a card. 🤓 It means showing the reader what to focus on using size, color, font weight, direction, etc. Of all the Power Apps design tips, this one is my favorite because it’s so simple yet powerful.

In the example below, our eyes are first drawn to the title “Initial Sample Verification”, then to the sample ID number, and finally the less important information on the 2nd row.

Insert a label with the text “Initial Sample Verification”.

Use these properties to style the label. This label has the biggest size, the darkest color, and the heaviest font weight. App users will look there first.

Font: Font.'Open Sans'
FontWeight: FontWeight.Semibold
Color: ColorValue("#000000")
Size: 16

Next, add another label with the ID number “#INDIR207IND50076”.

Use these properties to style the label. App users will look at this label 2nd because it has the same size and font weight as the title but it has a slightly lighter color. Positioning is important here too. The label is placed to the right of the title.

Font: Font.'Open Sans'
FontWeight: FontWeight.Semibold
Color: ColorValue("#747474")
Size: 16

Insert four more labels on the 2nd row of the card like this.

Give all of the labels the following properties. These labels have smaller text, with a normal font weight, and a light color. App users will look here last.

Font: Font.'Open Sans'
FontWeight: FontWeight.Normal
Color: ColorValue("#484644")
Size: 13

4. Custom SVG Icons

Power Apps comes with a set of standards icons. They are alright 😐. We can get better ones though by using custom SVG image code instead.

I offer a set of 2,000 Fluent UI SVG icons on my website. In this example, we are going to use Google’s Material Design icons instead from materialdesignicons.com.

Search the icon set to find the Account icon. Select View SVG and then copy the SVG code that appears.

Go back to Power Apps and add an Image control into the gallery.

Then paste the SVG code into the Image property of the Image control with a few key edits I describe in this post:

• Change all double quotes inside the SVG tag to single quotes
• Encode the SVG code as a URL
• Add the data type at the start

To save you time, here’s all of the code and icon’s I used in my example

Account icon

"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, "&EncodeUrl("<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 24 24'><path fill='#484644' d='M12,4A4,4 0 0,1 16,8A4,4 0 0,1 12,12A4,4 0 0,1 8,8A4,4 0 0,1 12,4M12,14C16.42,14 20,15.79 20,18V20H4V18C4,15.79 7.58,14 12,14Z' /></svg>")

Calendar icon

"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, "&EncodeUrl("<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 24 24'><path fill='#484644' d='M19,19H5V8H19M16,1V3H8V1H6V3H5C3.89,3 3,3.89 3,5V19A2,2 0 0,0 5,21H19A2,2 0 0,0 21,19V5C21,3.89 20.1,3 19,3H18V1M17,12H12V17H17V12Z' /></svg>")

Building icon

"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, "&EncodeUrl("<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 24 24'><path fill='#484644' d='M5,3V21H11V17.5H13V21H19V3H5M7,5H9V7H7V5M11,5H13V7H11V5M15,5H17V7H15V5M7,9H9V11H7V9M11,9H13V11H11V9M15,9H17V11H15V9M7,13H9V15H7V13M11,13H13V15H11V13M15,13H17V15H15V13M7,17H9V19H7V17M15,17H17V19H15V17Z' /></svg>")

Map-marker icon

"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, "&EncodeUrl("<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 24 24'><path fill='#484644' d='M12,11.5A2.5,2.5 0 0,1 9.5,9A2.5,2.5 0 0,1 12,6.5A2.5,2.5 0 0,1 14.5,9A2.5,2.5 0 0,1 12,11.5M12,2A7,7 0 0,0 5,9C5,14.25 12,22 12,22C12,22 19,14.25 19,9A7,7 0 0,0 12,2Z' /></svg>")

Chevron-right icon

"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, "&EncodeUrl("<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 24 24'><path fill='#747474' d='M8.59,16.58L13.17,12L8.59,7.41L10,6L16,12L10,18L8.59,16.58Z' /></svg>")

5. Brightly Colored Item Status Dots

I’ll be honest here. I just added a colored dot to each card to make it look interesting 🙄.

No real-world design should do this. Instead, a real-world design should use color to indicate an item’s status, it’s category, or it’s connection to other gallery items. Nonetheless, I’ll show how I did it.

Replace the gallery’s Items property code with this code. Each record in the table contains a color.

Table(
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#FD7E14")}, // Orange
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#DC3545")}, // Red 
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#28A745")}, // Green
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#FFC107")}, // Yellow
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#DC3545")}, // Red 
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#17A2B8")}, // Cyan
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#FD7E14")}, // Orange
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#DC3545")}, // Red 
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#28A745")}, // Green
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#FFC107")}, // Yellow
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#DC3545")}, // Red
    {ColorCode: ColorValue("#17A2B8")}  // Cyan
)

Then insert a button control into the gallery.

Style the button using these properties. That’s all. We’re done making an awesome looking gallery 😎.

BorderRadius: 3
BorderStyle: BorderStyle.None
Fill: ThisItem.ColorCode
Height: 10
Width: 10

Questions?

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