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Comment by jasonlynes | Hacker News Reader

i'm a designer and a developer and i'm using bootstrap in my latest project as a base UI. i figured, i'm introducing some big new ideas that are hard enough to explain to my users, why make them discover how a new menu or form works? so i used bootstrap for all my typical interactions and it's saving me weeks of work i would have spent rolling my own custom framework.

and it doesn't look anything like bootstrap.

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For curiosity sake, could you post a screenshot as an example of "not looking anything like bootstrap". Thanks!

We use some modified Bootstrap CSS at Blueprint (ss: http://d.pr/pqCT) for things like horizontal forms. You need to customize it, and new rules sometimes conflict with existing CSS, but it's working pretty well. I've used it in a more primary role on another serious web app and it's great because 2.0 has responsive CSS and has had lots of work done on it to make it stable across platform.

This is a wonderful example of how Bootstrap should work. Everything is familiar but it does not look cookie-cutter. The right amount of same and different go a long way.

We built the site for http://www.semantics3.com/ and we tried my best to use as little elements of bootstrap 1.4 as possible.

We loved the grid, the form elements and buttons and its sized. The first thing we re-did was the nav bar though. Apart from that we think the framework really accelerated the design process.

Did you ever feel like it got in the way?

I've been using it on new projects, but always found customizations a little awkward. Are you changing the actual bootstrap files (typography.less or whatever) or simply overriding them in your own style file?

I am overriding bootstrap.css. Which on hindsight seems like a bad idea. Now I am finding it a little difficult to migrate over to 2.0. So what I've ended up doing is copying over the new features that I want (like the new icons) and leaving the rest in legacy mode. No biggie. Dont really need a responsive design for this website.

I'm used to 960GS so I was at home when it came to bootstrap. I spent some time reading the examples provided, then started on a clean slate. Top nav, the mast then footer, then finally the main content. That way you are not technically tweaking their templates. You are branching out.

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