Hacker News Reader

> Bootstrap enforces a model where people without design expertise are supposed to be somehow be good enough at design to utilize these UI components effectively.

There's nothing that can save you from having bad taste. However, given good taste and not-so-great artistry, Bootstrap is a web developer's best friend, specially if you're looking for contract work or launching your v1 app. And even with bad taste, there are sufficient examples out there to steal, err, get inspiration from.

> I'm not okay with working on things that look like everyone else does.

You're suffering from selection bias as an HN reader visiting other hackers' websites and such who have heard of Bootstrap. The greater extent of the world has not seen Bootstrap, and if they have, isn't it better for them to experience something decent looking?

> Simple and handrolled > Bootstrap.

If you have the chops sure, but a good number of hackers do not have taste, and less have the artistic talent.

Think about sites like Hacker News or Craigslist. They are arguably not very "tasty" designs, but they are simple and they work.

That's an important point to digest. Just because something looks nice doesn't mean it's effective. It may be the opposite.

Sure, the website looks "nice", I guess, but is that the goal? Or is the goal of the site to get sign ups, generate referrals, make money, etc?

When you're done plugging in Bootstrap, does the design serve your goals? Or does it just look nice? Have you saved time or merely punted the design farther down the road?

Again, I'm playing Devil's advocate because I do see the value in Bootstrap. I just rarely hear any contrary opinions on Bootstrap and it's important to understand (or at least discuss) the trade offs in using a canned design.

I couldn't design a site like Hacker News, not in my wildest dreams. It's the essence of a site with everything supliferous taken away and that takes talent that I just don't have. It's less about "looking nice" and more about "ok can people who aren't me actually use this site?

Bootstrap really helps with stuff like that because it does a lot of heavy lifting for you (styled content, scaffolding, themed buttons, etc) and allows you to fiddle with that stuff to get the effect that you want while still making everything line up.

Now make no mistake about it people can still design awesome sites with nothing and people can definitely design terrible sites with bootstrap it's just that the bar for terrible is a little harder to reach if someone is holding your hand.

Also with regards to the whole "everything looks canned" I think that's largely a part of being on a site where bootstrap is very popular. I know I used a lot of bootstrap sites before I knew what it was and I was none the wiser but now that I used it too I see it everywhere.

Bootstrap is great for quickly turning a mockup into functional app.

If i know my site needs some thumbnails a navbar, icons and a nice font, I'd rather avoid recreating the wheel.

it's almost the Rails of HTML/CSS UI design

Think of bootstrap as a base, an alternative to the reset.css that everybody used to use. You can use as much or as little of it as possible. Everything that you haven't explicitly styled gets a sane default.

It also can be used as a specification for markup. The markup required for Bootstrap's form-horizontal is kind of ugly, but if everybody uses it than it becomes much easier to move form CSS from one project to another.

> At this point in its adoption curve, using Bootstrap is amateur. It says I have no idea how to style a webpage.

Similar to how, if I go to a website and I notice it's using Apache or nginx, I write them off as not having any idea how to write a web server, and that's something I look for from an application or service provider.

Facebook and Twitter could be said to lack identify, too. Google's page of search results and ads. Couple of columns, ads, navigation. People understand it. The consumer is already educated. I dunno :)