We often need to quickly prototype ideas for a company's internal R&D or for demonstrations for potential clients or investors. Most of the time, the audience is not technical at all and to increase the success of a demo, a visually appealing solution is quite important.

Years ago, expectations were lower and usually, the salesperson would build a powerpoint presentation and would pitch how the software should work, its benefits, and so on.

With so many open source technologies and cloud services (which are often free for a basic app deployment) available, expectations are now way higher. To make a successful demo to a nontechnical audience, the app should be visually appealing. If you build a presentation for developers, and it's not about how to style applications, unstyled apps actually work better. In many cases, styles can be distractive if you want to learn other concepts not related to it.

In this chapter...