I think the benefit of something like Bootstrap is getting an idea off the floor with _some_ nod towards aesthtics. If I can't afford a designer, I'm happy to use someones idea of a 'default' to get it to the point that it is functional, relatively easy on the eyes, etc. Then, when the funds / time is available focus on tweaking things to not appear like the bootstrap default.
Great, Another Bootstrap Site
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#102The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…
> it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different I think the problem is that it's not very easy. And that's why you see so little variation (combined with a certain amount of laziness, of course). Editing the CSS directly is pretty much impossible for mere mortals. And of you're not familiar with LESS and compiling styles, you're going to have trouble.
It's not hard at all. You don't need to recompile with LESS - just have a separate style sheet which overrides the default bootstrap one in selected areas.
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#103Bootstrap 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…
"But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications"
You're kidding, right? What about emotional design, making something that connects the user to your app?
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 modifica…
But for a lot of things, I really don't care if it leaves an impression or not. I just want the thing to work well for my users. Bootstrap provides me with (almost) everything I need to do that. I'm not saying custom design isn't important or doesn't add value, I'm just saying it doesn't always do.
You don't care if your app / site leaves an impression? It's not just the user flow, it's also emotional - design is holistic.
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#105Looks like most of the negative comments are from designers which totally makes sense; you're getting paid for coming up with neat little buttons and so on... but on the other hand, why didn't you designers come up with a good (open-source) framework for these things. Teach people, give them rope, enable them... oh, and there are already tools like bootswatch coming up. This is not the end, just the beginning for a sane design for the rest of us (aka the developers).
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#106I think this entire assertion has the wrong idea.
This idea would be valid if the universal alternative to using Bootstrap is some impressive design stitched together by your in-house crack team of designers. But I'm sure the alternative to Bootstrap for most people is for the developer to use his own html/css know-how to construct something passable as he goes.
So, for most people, I'd wager that Bootstrap is mostly just a time optimization that saves the developer from spending time on a design that would have been far less impressive anyways, that saves the developer from burning time that could be allocated to the actual product.
I find it silly to condemn people for how they allocate their time.
Even the whole pro-Bootstrap chorus of "But it's just a standard interface for the web" is silly. Really? I have yet to even stumble across a Bootstrap website in the wild that wasn't linked to from a Show HN. Are these monthly Bootstrap rants conflating the HN echo chamber with the internet? Weekend solo-dev projects with funded business websites? I guarantee it.
The likening of Bootstrap to Wordpress' default theme is telling. Does anyone here really encounter WP's default theme in the wild? I sure don't. Maybe the majority of WP installs still have the default theme, but it's in the same way that the majority of WAMP installs still have the default "It Works!" Apache screen on localhost.
I just don't get the point. If Bootstrap really was some prevalent interface that most of the web started using, then you guys that do have the crack team of designers at your disposal should be excited! Here's your chance to stand out! But I'm using Bootstrap because it's literally faster than any other alternative I can think of until I have someone separately working on a UI branch that I can merge into my code.
If I took your advice and stopped using Bootstrap because you assume "I don't care enough" to make a custom design, I'd end up with something that will probably look worse and guaranteed to take much longer to create giving me more bottlenecks as I get hamstringed by aesthetics when I could instead be funneling my efforts into business logic and not into something that's rather trivial to switch out when my app is deployed and my time frees up to address less-critical concerns.
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found your opinion to be flawed, IMHO. While most knobs looks similar, you always can see before even touching whether this knob is a rotating one or just press a handle. Furthermore, I have never seen a door with a knob to be placed 10 inches from the ceiling (or the floor), something that would definitely be considered "original" and "nonstandard".
There's a difference between unique style, and unique function. It's possible to have a unique style while still taking advantage of existing affordances. The visual style has to work with the affordance for it to be useful, but they aren't in lock-step. For example, both a button with a gradient simulating a curved surface with top-down lighting, and a button with flat color but a drop shadow indicate they are to be…
> There's a difference between unique style, and unique function
just how many way can you click a button?
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#108From the perspective of someone who frequents Hacker News then of course it's going to seem like there's a ton of sites using the nearly-stock bootstrap look. That's because people like us actually look at sites like "Built With Bootstrap" and check out people's demos of bootstrap sites. Back in the real world the average internet user will likely never notice.
Most sites in the early stages will have few visitors and due to variety of interests it's unlikely that a single person will be using a large enough number of these sites to start realizing this problem.
As the successful sites grow larger and move beyond the early stages it's likely the developers will have access to more resources to improve their site theme over time and move away from the bootstrap look.
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
But for a lot of things, I really don't care if it leaves an impression or not. I just want the thing to work well for my users. Bootstrap provides me with (almost) everything I need to do that. I'm not saying custom design isn't important or doesn't add value, I'm just saying it doesn't always do.
You don't care if your app / site leaves an impression? It's not just the user flow, it's also emotional - design is holistic.
For some things I really don't. Think internal tooling and such.
Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a difference between unique style, and unique function. It's possible to have a unique style while still taking advantage of existing affordances. The visual style has to work with the affordance for it to be useful, but they aren't in lock-step. For example, both a button with a gradient simulating a curved surface with top-down lighting, and a button with flat color but a drop shadow indicate they are to be…
> There's a difference between unique style, and unique function just how many way can you click a button?
If the button requires click and drag, like the shutter button for Mattebox on the iPhone, then it's unique compared to the other ordinary shutter buttons, even though visually it's barely different. (Fortunately, it's different enough to indicate what needs to be done — affordance.) That's a fairly unique interaction, certainly within camera apps, that doesn't require much style differentiation.
Using the door handle metaphor, and example would be a handle that's a few inches from the floor and looks almost the same as a handle at 32 inches but is better served by pressing with your foot. Visually the same but very different interactions.