Keen followers of the Bold Tech blog and The Toolbox newsletter will know that the Bold Tech team has had some fun recently building out creative UIs on Retool!
As most Retool devs can relate, it’s easy to get trapped in a lot of the same design patterns when building out apps on Retool, particularly when building a lot of admin panels, dashboards, and CRUDs (like we do day-in and out!).
That’s why we set our team the challenge of rebuilding their favorite app UIs in Retool to see how far they could stretch components and enhance the design with a few sprinkles of Custom CSS. We’re pretty excited about the results! Next Retool hackathon anyone? @kbn @sarahs
While it’s easy to think that UI design on Retool is very rigid, this exercise really showed us that with a bit of creativity it was possible to create effects and functionality like:
Containers with gradients
Collapsing sidebar navigation
Popover UIs
Creative dropdown nav menus
Subtle user feedback in the form of hovers
Here’s the final selection. You can head to the blog posts to see how we built some of the key features, play around with the apps, and even download the templates to import into your own Retool environments!
… and even Retool 
(obviously by @stefancvrkotic )
Interested to hear what you all think! What apps should we clone next?
Awesome! Thanks so much for sharing