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by Periodic 5268 days ago
After playing around with Bootstrap, I realized what a huge boon it was to my projects (programmer lacking in design skills). One thing I like about it is I don't have to pick colors. It does the border, button, text, and nav-bar colors for me. I don't trust myself to pick my own colors! I would really like a way to preview or be able to pick some other colors other people have made. Maybe you could expose a perma-link to a set of config options so they are easy to share.

I'm also amazed at how often I spot it now. Seems like it's everywhere.

6 comments

I second the entire comment -- well, excluding the programmer lacking design skills.

As a developer with a decent amount of design skills, what I love is that their defaults are extremely easy to customise and extend where necessary.

> I'm also amazed at how often I spot it now. Seems like it's everywhere.

I also see it everywhere, which is the main impetus for me to come up with a completely customised version that reflects my design style. Hopefully more people do the same instead of just using it straight off of a clone.

I suspect we will see a wave of "skins" released for it soon.
I'm creating a library of design patterns for BS, so ping me if you want to be included.

EDIT: I'm sorry I don't have a signup list yet! Just email me at my HN username at gmail and I'll send out an alert that way.

would love to be included. Would be cool also if you could allow users just plug in any palette from www.colourlovers.com or patterns from subtlepatterns.com which would add quick/mass customization of a site and really simple/sweet A/B testing.
Ha, Darius from colourlovers was one of the first people I tested the idea out on over breakfast a few weeks back and he really warmed up to it, especially considering the ambitious marketplace he's building now:

http://creativemarket.com

And subtlepatterns kicks ass, it's been my secret designer weapon ever since it came out.

post it to HN once it's ready )
Absolutely! Definitely inspired by all the Bootstrap activity I've been seeing here lately. Here's another one - a form builder based on Bootstrap and jquery:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3442883

Do you have a public repo?
Unfortunately no, not yet, I'm still abstracting out the themes from a few recent side projects and wanted to clean things up before posting anywhere.
Use sites like http://www.colourlovers.com/ to get inspiration for colors. If you are a programmer you should spend some time studying the color theory - much of it is based on math and you can actually often calculate which colors will work together.
If you need a responsive grid with a similar aesthetic, check out Zurb's Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com
I believe bootstrap will be adding a responsive grid with bootstrap 2.0, currently being developed in the 2.0-wip branch.

http://bootstrap.io/Demo/Scaffolding

Yep, responsiveness is the main feature of 2.0. Arguably not as responsive as other frameworks though as it doesn't use percentage widths to gradually scale columns. For a given width range, the column widths are fixed.
It isn't as fully featured, but is a great, simple alternative that works well on mobile also.
Agreed, I use it in all my projects now and it is a huge time saver. If nothing else, not having to futz around with form elements more than makes up for the added overhead.
I totally agree. I've been wondering for 15 years why every website has to have a special custom design anyway. With native apps, custom design almost always works against them, as opposed to the OS's default, familiar design.

Maybe in the future, something like Bootstrap will become the default way that web browsers render websites, and we can just get rid of most of the boilerplate CSS.

I am all over bootstrap. My both sites http://www.mockuptiger.com and https://www.wireframes.org are done with bootstrap

I will be converting my other sites all to bootstrap. But with slight color changes it can provide a difference but consistency