I wish people would appreciate other peoples effort a little bit more. As far as I can tell it is a one man project that has been around for a while. It takes a lot of effort to do this.

It is a valid concern though. It's very common to see technically genius projects, that don't get enough attention because their project landing page looks horrible. I kinda don't understand how people can be so skilled, and put so much effort to make a nice thing, and then completely skimp on the design.

E.g. here it wouldn't even take much. It's mostly just padding issues, and having sharp and rounded corners mixed, and maybe the color palette of the tasks could be improved.

I wouldn't call it skimping, maybe the author likes it or can't do better without paying somebody to do it.

I actually appreciate open source projects so much that I get angry when they lose out due to things like this.

Check out https://www.taiga.io/ ?

Yes much nicer. Hence more popular too.

I actually like it, apart from maybe text needing a little bit more padding when close to the edges of the cards etc.

The UI is minimalist without feeling like it's lacking, it's usable and the performance is great because it doesn't try to have lots of fancy gradients or animations for the sake of it.

Still using OpenProject because of the nice multi-project feature set there and Jira having rotten my brain, but Kanboard is easily 10x times faster than the sluggish OpenProject experience.

There is a plugin which greatly improves UI and somewhat UX.

If you don't like it, you're welcome to submit a PR.

Been a while since I used it, but as I recall it was very simple to customize the design. My opinion is that, aside from fonts, functionality trumps design, and there's typically a tradeoff between the two.