I really stink at making things pretty

I must have a block on how to make nice layouts.

I’ve looked at grid card, mushroom cards, etc., and I think it’s beyond me how to make nice looking, ergonomic and functional layouts.

For example, here’s one of my dashboards:

And here’s another:

Can someone help?

Thank you.

It depends a lot on what how the dashboards are going to be used. Who is going to use them? If it’s just you, and you understand what’s going on :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: then clutter may not be a problem; if other people are going to use them, clutter needs to be kept to a minimum.

As a general principle, I would say more dashboards and more cards: a dashboard for each functional area (lighting, heating, security, energy consumption etc.) and a card for each group of entities - perhaps one for each room in the lighting dashboard, for example, even if some only contain a couple of switches.

In your examples, I notice that you have control cards (with switches etc.) and monitoring cards (with graphs etc.). You might consider separating these into different dashboards, unless you have a specific reason for wanting them together.

You seem to be using default icons - you might experiment with some different ones.

When you start a new dashboard you might try starting with a blank rather than the busy one the app offers (apologies if you’re doing this already!).

I agree with the more tabs on each dashboard. I also have different dashboards for different locations. I have a wall mounted tablet and the front page on that has the most commonly needed switches and info. I have other pages for the lights in each room, audio and TV, environment etc.

The dash board on my pc has a lot more detail on the front page as there is a lot more real estate.

I tend to use button cards inside grid cards, inside grid cards this gives me the flexibility to have lines with single items or cards above or below a line of buttons. I also use conditional cards inside these grid cards for information like person location where there is no need to know where they are if they are at home. Similar stuff for which lights are on or doors open no need to know if they are closed, so they don’t show when closed.

I try to keep the ‘less is more’ approach and let HA control as much as possible so my dashboards are quite basic.
If HA is another app for you to manually control your house and replace all other apps that’s fine.
If you want to look at your dashboards a lot and/or show off, that’s fine too.

For the things I want to control manually I have removed most of the names and used icons that make clear what the button does.
As Stiltjack states: do you need monitoring on your main view to be able to look at them all the time, immediately…

Wow, thanks very much guys!

You’ve given me a lot to think about (which is good).

I use HA across 6 different physical locations. One of those locations has a bunch of different physical areas.

At 1 of the 6 locations I have a Fire Tablet running Fully Kiosk, but it doesn’t show much and is used (for now) just for viewing (not controlling/managing).

Data sources at locations include:

Thermostats, some multiple tstats at a single location/area (Ecobee or LG ThinQ)

Temperature/humidity sensors (Shelly or Sonoff)

Smart light switches and dimmers (Lutron, Martin Jerry, Tasmota, TP-Link Kasa)

Emporia Vue energy monitors (some locations and areas have multiple monitors – monitoring multiple sensors in different breaker boxes)

Blue Iris video feeds

Local weather

Schlage smart lock

Shelly Uni monitoring voltage

Flume water flow

It would be great to standardize on a look for each dashboard, but I don’t know if that’s possible given the different sets of data sources and brands at each location.

You could standardize on function, rather than data sources/brands. Most cards show entities so they look much the same whatever the source.

Hey Josephny,

I am right there with you. Just a few months into setting up HA and I’m down the rabbit hole on dashboards.

It seems we’re both trying to do the same thing, so I’ll tell what I ended up with:

Mushroom Cards
Layout Card
Surveillance Card
Browser Mod
Wallpanel (for screensaver on the tablet)

I found this YT Vid from Smart Home Junkie to be extremely valuable in learning how to properly setup grid layout:

Here’s some screenshots of my panel so far:



If you have any questions or want any YAML, let me know :slight_smile: