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Great, Another Bootstrap Site

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Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#51

Post by masonhensley »

danso wrote: post #43

The OP links to this site: http://builtwithbootstrap.com/ There are definitely a few sites that look barely-out-of-the-cookie-cutter...however, there are others that are only vaguely bootstrappish at a glance. What do people consider the minimum amount of alterations before a bootstrap site looks unique enough? Besides color I mean....font-spacing and sizes? Going from a 12-col grid to 15/16/20-grid?

I don't think anyone would suggest changing the grid system or standard font sizes as a way to differentiate your bootstrapped site. I wouldn't mess with the scaffolding type stuff unless you really need to create a specific desired effect. Off the top of my head, the quickest ways to make a bstrap site look unique and keep the haters happy would be:

1- Navbar, the dark gray will not fly, tweak the height of it too or remove it all together.

2- Background of your container, give it some life. Here is a good place to start- http://subtlepatterns.com/

3- Special font for your branding/ H tags, boom (http://www.google.com/webfonts)

4- change up the button colors a tad, if only one, the blue one, it seems to be everywhere.

The above items will take you 15-30 min depending on how many combinations you try out & will take you pretty far.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#53

Post by drats »

kingsidharth wrote: post #20
carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

To be honest, I'd prefer Amazon to use Bootstrap with a yellow branded bar at the top, ditto Facebook (with FB blue). Ditto for any flight search website. Anything that's an "application". With blogs however, I don't want to see it resembling the default.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#54

Post by weixiyen »

When I saw font awesome, I did not think about how to use it with a bootstrap theme. I saw it as a totally separate entity completely. To be honest Font Awesome was more impressive to me and potentially have much further usage beyond just on bootstrap-themed sites.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#55

Post by tbatterii »

i feel the same way about magazines with their pages, and why are they always square?

seriously though, poo pooing something that gets you a decent look and feel quickly is just being a self important ass. Not every web site has to be an exercise in css masturbation and cross browser dick swinging.

i read this entire article in the voice of the comic book guy from the simpsons.

/written during my lunch hour spent tracking down IE8 bugs.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#56

Post by rndmize »

typicalrunt wrote: post #13
carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

+1 to this. When I talk to other designers and inevitably get into arguments with them about standards, I try to get them to see it from a consumer's point of view for non-IT products. There are a lot of non-IT products that have the same design: doors to houses, door knobs, rear-view mirrors, tires. The list goes on. While it's fun to see a new design to a Web site/app, even as a techie I sometimes struggle with usi…

I find this and the parent to be flawed. Door, knobs and so on come in a wide variety of shapes, materials and colors; and so do buttons (open an explorer or finder window - almost every means of interacting with these relies on a button, and they vary widely in appearance.)

The argument this blog post makes isn't that there's a problem with standards, but that a lot of people are using bootstrap without any modification - which is ironic, because modifying bootstrap is vastly easier and safer than creating a new design from scratch.

It takes very little to adjust the colors of the buttons provided by bootstrap, or the links, or add a texture to the background, or change some fonts out (Google webfonts makes this ridiculously easy). When this isn't done, the site leaves no lasting impression unless what it provides is so amazing I can't possibly forget it (this is pretty rare).

For me, power tools would be something that goes at the far functional end of a functional/aesthetic design scale, and even then companies will use widely different colors to separate themselves from their competitors and make them easy to recognize. Perhaps there's something to be learned there.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#57

Post by hemancuso »

Design is very much the culmination of many details and decisions. What is great about bootstrap is all of those decisions are made for you, leaving you to focus on the part you're good at - the app.

A nice palette of widgets and views makes for a consistent and fairly intuitive experience. Nobody argues Mac apps look too much like one another. Folk get angry when they stop looking like Mac apps.

But this is the web, not the Mac. Websites are expected to look different from one another. But when a engineer starts customizing bootstrap so that it "doesn't look bootstrap" I think the end product is often a broken design with awkward colors, margins and compositions.

I think the author of the OP would enjoy a greater set of bootstrap themes, something like bootswatch.com and furthermore it seems like a great opportunity for a company like themeforest.net or someone similar.

Bootstrap is popular not because of visual styling. What sets it apart is incredible documentation and programmer-friendly semantic markup. Regarding bootstrap as a theme is a disservice. Bootstrap is a framework which could use some more high quality visual themes.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#59

Post by kingsidharth »

jonknee wrote: post #35
kingsidharth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

And yet Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a nearly identical top bar (sorry, Facebook's is blue). They have billions of page views to analyze and have all come to the same conclusion. > NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Boots…

They are not. It's not just the colors but the visual style. They are different for all three. Conclusion is > have a top bar .. with distinct visual style.

> If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win.

Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

>Consistency itself can be beautiful.

Yes, same with search engines, if you used Google you can use Yahoo. But still their visual design is different in many ways if not search result. You can tell Yahoo from Google but not two Bootstrap sites.

Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#60

Post by kingsidharth »

nirvdrum wrote: post #33
kingsidharth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

Do you get confused when you run native apps on your Mac? Like, you can't recall which app does which because they all use native controls with a standard L & F? If you do, this is a usability concern I've not heard of and would love more research into. Most usability studies focus on how effectively one can perform a task in an app, not how quickly one can recollect which application performs which function for them…

VIsual design: I'd be confused if all apps used same icons. Paramount to using that bootstrap topbar with same visual style.

Note: You could change colors / gradients and some visual design aspects and things would be different.

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