Flatstrap - Bootstrap with no rounded corners, gradients or drop shadows | Hacker News Reader

Flatstrap - Bootstrap with no rounded corners, gradients or drop shadows

littlesparkvt.com

149 pointsbinarydreams79 comments

Metro UI does have gradients and drop shadows, though they are very subtle.

If you are good at design, you wouldn't need to start from Bootstrap. If you are not so good at design, Bootstrap is a great framework, but using flat, all-square UI elements can cause some problems, you may be unaware of.

If you use Flatstrap, your <code> tags, labels and buttons will all look the same. If, in the spirit of flatness, you'd also removed the inset shadow on form inputs, then all visual cues for either clicking (element is higher than the page) or form input (element is lower than the page) are gone. This reduces usability and discoverability. [1]

Rounded boxes serve another function, where they draw the attention of the eye to the contents of the box -- It flows more pleasantly too [2]

Designers going for the flat design trend, should carefully strike a balance between a completely flat design, and using subtle gradients, underlines, rounded corners, color, shadows and pseudo-3D to convey information that matches our expectations and wiring of our brains.

[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html Flat styles reduce discoverability

[2] http://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easie...

The "flat design trend" is just minimalism to be fair. Something we've had for ages.

But the latest series of flat designs do often rely on rounded corners too. Glad you wrote this though as I was about to do the same :)

> If you are good at design, you wouldn't need to start from Bootstrap. If you are not so good at design, Bootstrap is a great framework,

Just to nitpick, even if you're 'good' at design, Bootstrap is nice if you just don't want to spend the time for a prototype or small project, and also want to be able to drop-in different themes easily to test them out (ie, Bootswatch).

> using flat, all-square UI elements can cause some problems, you may be unaware of.

Remember that, in "true" Metro, all titles and elements are clickable, so the concept of affordance and discoverability is almost moot - its mere existence signals that it can be clicked on.

This is a a paradigm shift from what we've been using all our lives, so naturally people will need to adjust to it a bit, but I don't think it's fundamentally different from adjusting to clicking on rounded rectangles with dark edges instead of pressing a physical button.

> If you are good at design, you wouldn't need to start from Bootstrap.

I completely disagree with this statement. Bootstrap has nothing to do with design - it's all about structure.

The responsive grid layout is great. With some good planning, you can get desktop and mobile optimized versions of your site with much less effort than a custom framework. As a bonus, you also get a great deal of Javascript UI elements for free. And the fact that all of these elements are unified and tested across browsers is a huge time-saver, too.

If you do know what you are doing design-wise, the LESS stylesheets are well-structured. You can do something as simple as changing the base color of your links to diving in to completely customize the look of your app.

As for Flatstrap, it's great to see an alternative base design to the Bootstrap framework.

I agree completely that Bootstrap can be a timesaver. For designers and non-designers alike.

The point I tried to make was that, if you depend for design on Bootstrap UI, if you need it to produce nice looking pages, then just flattening everything may cause problems: You would have removed unified and user-tested elements of design.

For content: a fun, distantly related, story from 1981: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

With all due respect, changing a few settings in 1 or 2 LESS files is now a top #2 story on HN? One of three things are happening as approach the end of the world...

1) Slow news day

2) What quantifies a hacker is being grossly influenced by what has quantified a startup the last few funding cycles.

3) Get off my lawn.

But they rewrote the documentation too! And added their names.

Seriously, this is a simple theme, nothing special, people have been theming bootstrap since it came out. Moving on then...

They clearly didn't. There's a ton of references to "Bootstrap" still in the docs. Clearly it was a half-assed copy/paste job.

Comments like this annoy me. Open source zealots are always rambling on about how you can just "fork it and do what you want!" - and then when someone actually does, watch the pitchforks come out.

I'm not an open source zealot. I like open source, and I promote open source, but I also prefer when people try not to ride on other people's shoulders.

That's exactly my point.

How is it intellectually honest to push for openness, but then to belittle people who use the rights the license gives them?

By their very nature, all open source licenses are variations of "Ride on my shoulders!"

Comments like this annoy me. He was simply trying to mention a valid point (they really didn't do a very good job at 'forking') and he gets generalized as an Open Source zealot and hanged for his crimes.

Lay off. There was no need to bring out the extremist insults.

Meh, like I said I was going to do this tonight myself, now I don't have to. HN saved me some work and I think that's worth an upvote.

The striped progress bar... isn't.

I don't know... I guess 'flat' is the hip thing and everyone should run out and change to it, but I'm not sure it's an improvement. I kind of like buttons to stick out a bit.

I like the flat style, but it's annoying having buttons and alerts/labels look exactly the same. You can't immediately tell what's clickable and what isn't.

In this situation, it's probably best to differentiate between the two with color—but you're right, it's silly to lose the already-established visual cues.

Colour is a terrible visual cue because colour perception is heavily relative to the viewer. Strong visual signposting is more apt (hence why playing with underlining should not be abused).

I like the flatness too, but still prefer roundrects. They'll never go out of style.

And the funny thing is that the people that are now loudly proclaiming everything should be flat are likely the same that were calling all old 'flat' interfaces boring in the days that gradients and shadows became hip.

UI design seems more sensitive to fashion whims these days than woman's clothing.

UX hipsters I tell ya!

> UI design seems more sensitive to fashion whims these days than woman's clothing.

I'd say that this is largely in part due to the fact that so many designers base their entire livelihoods on copying trends, instead of really understanding why they should or shouldn't. Bad photographers are everywhere with awkward poses and HDR, but bad designers can mask their lack of creativity by mimicking the 'next hot thing' and get tons of kudos for it.

Exactly. Flat is the new thing, but people forget that depth and perspective are useful visual analogues. They help us realize what we can interact with versus what is just a flat piece of paper. YMMV.

Funny thing is when you click on examples the navigation menu indeed has rounded corners which immediately stands out :P

The first thing I noticed as well!

The text on the homepage has drop shadow too...

I, actually, like this, since android, windows 8 and even google are now using this simplified flat almost-not-rounded components. Feels much cleaner to me.

do, you, really?

Yes. I do like Windows 8 UI elements, though I'll like them more after some more iterations from Microsoft. Metro is not very suitable for PC usage, but the direction is nice.

He was mocking your commage.

Unrelated noted: I agree, Metro is the best thing to happen to UX in a long time.

I understand sacrasm (or irony - never could tell the difference without overthinking), but I believe that Metro will become more usable over time.

I, think, you're, still, missing, his, point;

Hint: It had nothing to do with Metro and everything to do with this character ','

And if you can't tell the difference between sarcasm and irony without thinking, never mind over-thinking, then you likely understand neither.

Edit: The initial reply to you was neither ironic, nor sarcastic.

but Metro is quite nice.

OK. This is about commas. I'm not native english speaker.

Sorry, I couldn't resist :)

The devs should include a global-corner-radius setting in variables.less

That's actually a much better sounding idea than just fragmenting the source into a whole new project, that will probably eventually suffer from disregard as Bootstrap continues to flourish.

In fact... https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/wiki/Contributing-to-Bo...

boottheme.com does a good job. It's a 'wysiwyg' editor of the bootstrap less variables, and that includes border-radius.

There are variables for @baseBorderRadius, etc. They don't hit all of the spots yet, but it's getting there with each new version of Bootstrap.

I really, really, really hate this flatshit design trend. Not so much by the way it looks –or works– but because of the sense of superiority of their proponents. I hate that it is being touted as some kind of movement that is liberating us from the evilness of skeumorphism. It's bullshit. A good designer should put the user experience above his own snobbish idealisms. Function over form.

I don't think its intended as outright superiority, I think its a reaction to it. CSS3 came out and suddenly everywhere everything is rounded corners, gradient colors and shadowed text. It was cool and useful in places, but with the popularization of Bootstrap the internet feels flooded with the concepts. And it did feel like it was pushed into a lot of designs where it wasn't a good fit.

I suspect many people dislike those design choices and are happy to see a counter-push for 'simple' design - flat colors, no gradients, etc.

Don't understand the downvotes, that's exactly what's going on. I alluded to this upthread; this aesthetic is more about Microsoft attempting minimalism to look trendy than than it is about usability, which is why qualified UX folk have been blasting it.

Very nice! I kept the gradients but got rid of rounded corners here http://fandalism.com/

Hey man, it would be a cool to see a follow up post for fandalism on what came out of your "I have 404,772 users. Now what?" story.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850739

I am very very very pro rounded corners for clickable buttons. Rounded Corners is one of the main things that lets a user know a button is clickable. In fact roundedness was so important in UX that in the past before we had the border-radius: property in CSS we used an actual image made in photoshop as the button. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I don't remember seeing a rounded button until the 2000's I think.

Websites used the native <button> and <input type="button"> so they got that native windows and mac button look. Square, beveled, 3d look, gray. Then to style them they would just use <a> links with images inside, now we're back to code with css.

The Affix still has a drop shadow and rounded corners. Apart from that, looks great!

A good next step for Bootstrap would be to create a centralized theme repository with the ability to select and change themes from a centrally-managed repository of approved themes. Almost like an npm for Bootstrap themes.

http://bootswatch.com/

Like that, but something that actually grows over time.

http://builtwithbootstrap.com ?

I've done this myself, but nice to have a dedicated project for this! :)

Heh, I think its funny that your "Examples" in the "Get Started" page have rounded corners in the thumbnail preview :)

You guys forgot the "edit" in copy -> paste -> edit

Awesome. Although you would think since they are using a css preprocessor in the bootstrap project they could allow a flag on compile for things like these?

Nice. I did it by myself some months ago!

https://github.com/tagliala/bootstrap/commit/0b9d96517870009...

I removed gradients, shadows, round corners...

You did a step forward: button gradients!

As many of you pointed out, the problem are bootstrap's updates. Maybe a script that removes .border-radius and converts #gradient in plain color is better

"We <3 Bootstrap"

I didn't go to college so please help me out here. If Flatstrap < 3 Bootstrap is true then is Flatstrap > 2 Bootstrap also true?

Giving the benefit of the doubt that this isn't a math joke (because it did make me chuckle), <3 in this context is supposed to be a heart, thus "We <3 n" translates to "We love n"

I find it odd that they used rounded corners in their documentation, even though not having rounded corners is one of the key features.

Kudos for keeping .img-rounded in there. That would be a very confusing class name if you straightened that out.

I think a worthy discussion question is:

Are rounded corners a bad thing, and not a part of the "flat design" movement?

My 2¢: I'm not sure they are a bad thing. I think you can still have a flat design and use rounded corners. Frankly, I dislike when buttons are flat _and_ right-angled because too much affordance is lost.

I wrote about this and the general defacto styling of Bootstrap being used everywhere here: http://xn--d28h.tumblr.com/post/36805803730/apps-and-bootstr...

Awesome, easier to trick around and make metro UI like web design.

Though I think this could be easible compiled directly from bootstrap, just by stripping rounded corners and gradients. Or is there some other new ingredient?

Added: https://github.com/netdna/bootstrap-cdn/issues/70

The question I would ask is: why?

And the answer has to be more than "we got rid of the fancy stuff devs don't care about".

Nice!

Although I like rounded corners and gradients, it's good to provide options for those who don't think the same.

Very much in keeping with recent Google and Microsoft design direction. I quite like it.

You missed a spot. http://grab.by/i2DM

Also, the github buttons on index page.

Is the LESS source not available or am I just not looking in the right place?

May it be remarked, that the text on the starting page still has shadow ;) ?

All praise to the LittleSparkVT! Though I could just view stuf f in IE8 ;)

Does seem to be a rounded corner on nav nav-list bs-docs-sidenav affix-top

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm sure we can still take away the colors and the fonts, and why do we even render the page at all?

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Einstien

this sucks!...that is all

that's great

I was going to do this tonight, now I don't have to. Thanks.

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