How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour
24ways.org
24ways.org
To the people making and upvoting these putdowns: you don't come across as caring about design; you appear to care about feeling superior. That is not smart. It is a mean person's idea of what it is to be smart. As HN has acquired a reputation for being a smart place, it has become a mean place.
Do you guys know what "mean", in the sense of "nasty", means? It means common. Look up the root. The more you reinforce your wish to feel smart in this way, the more common you in fact become. It's hard to see this, because self-image is always telling us the opposite, and that feels good — really good. It's the opiate of the jerk.
In my experience, if one really wants to get smarter, one must work on inhibiting this. I was going to offer a tip or two, but who would want them?
Incidentally, these self-appointed protectors of Design against the masses appear to me to be significantly more mediocre in this way than some of the other subgroups here. Perhaps it's sample bias. Or perhaps it's because there's so little objectivity to any of it that one gets a purer strain of identity politics — "Leave Design to the Designers" and all that.
On another note, thanks to the OP for the helpful and playful article!
After not having personally touched any frontend code for a number of years, I recently found myself in the position of having to personally bootstrap an important side project - backend, frontend, design, and mobile - all on a miniscule budget.
The process she outlines so closely mirrored my own that I'm still not entirely convinced she didn't have a hidden camera in my office. This post would have easily saved me weeks of fumbling around, false starts, procrastinating, and looking around for the appropriate resources and frameworks. In my opinion my end product looks much more polished, but she was clearly just putting together a simple demo to support the text, and her design quality is easily sufficient to test out a minimum viable product. Of course, once you get some traction and have a budget to hire a designer, you should because design is sacrosanct blah, blah, blah, etc, etc.
But if you're a programmer on your own with no budget, just trying to get your idea out into the world and not embarrass yourself, this could be invaluable.
You can make a blog post and submit on HN?
And my neighbour still has no damn clue what is Bootstrap, so whatever if it still 'looks like Bootstrap'. The audience doesn't care.
Nice submission, if you ask me.
This is the first time I have seen it, and it looks amazing.
Bootstrap has a very rich design already, so it's not a great scaffold to build on top of because there's very little room for you to add flavor and customization to it without making it look like a frankenstein design.
Skeleton is really minimal, it basically just does typography, some basic form styling, and a grid system. It's a much better base to work off of and add to than Bootstrap.
Judging by your shallow critique, I would surmise you(ironically) had a low attention span and didn't even read it.
Such a post would take years to read. People spend years learning the subjects. I much prefer a practical post such as this, which delivers on what it claims. The site she ended up with was much better than half-decent.
Anyway, I have a huge difficulty imagining any blog post about, let's say, typography that does more good than harm in terms of what it teaches people about design. Worrying about anything more than sans vs serif will probably just waste their time.
And to take it further, if an average person like me can't even tell the difference, what's the point of it?
The article seems to have mainly recieved two contradictory responses from HN. a) I already use Bootstrap, this article is useless, and b) this article is bad because it recommends bootstrap, which you should never use, instead devote the next decade of your life to learning design and build something unique and award winning instead.
Then perhaps you shouldn't be giving design advice.
"I am a designer. I am not a programmer. Here's how to build a half-decent web application in half an hour. First, download PHP..."
All due respect but the author knows just enough "design" to be dangerous, so to speak. Bootstrap is well-designed (dull, but well-designed), and the author's redesign is more of an "un-designing". Arbitrarily adding fonts, colors, and background images take a perfectly usable layout and make it look like something straight out of 2002.
(Do people still use "pimp" as a verb non-ironically?)
[Edit] A note of clarification: I mean no disrespect to anyone doing web design, whether their job title starts with a capital-D or not. I just wouldn't recommend that most of them dole out advice about it.
She's not saying "this is going to be a professional design for your next project", the title itself contains "half-decent".
She's providing insightful tips for developers to make their pet projects look..like they're not designed by engineers (we do tend to make a mess of things).
And the advice she gives is perfectly fine for exactly that. There are fonts that look good together, subtly textured backgrounds do look better than simple, flat colored one's and using basic color theory upgrades a websites look (teal vs. orange, cough). Together, they make something that looks half-decent.
Just like the author claimed.
I like that they are sharing what they have learnt about a field that isn't theirs and doing so in a way that will appeal to other programmers.
I often find design tips from programmers much more relatable and usable for my skill set than I do design tips from designers.
I suspect, in this case, that you're simply not this article's intended audience. If you've already got a good feel for design, then the suggestions could feel simplistic.
We publish an article every day during advent. It would be easy to turn out 24 articles that everyone nods their heads to, but it would be really dull and a disservice to our readers. In order to have a really vibrant schedule of interesting things, not every article will appeal to every reader - and that's totally okay.
Today was for developers struggling to know how to make their projects look a bit better. Yesterday was some reasonably hardcore CSS selector stuff. Friday was about designing questionnaires. It's all about variety.
We're happy if any individual doesn't like an article, as long as we're never being dull.
Thanks for getting it out there.
I'm not the target audience for this article either so it really is hard to judge, but I got something out of it and I can see that a number of people found it helpful and timely.
Don't change!
For sure. I've seen a lot of these "improve bootstrap" articles that advocate adding fonts, colors, etc. But, at the end of the day, the webpage is still obviously twitter bootstrap with a few tweaks (almost always for the worse. I'm not a designer, but "oversized header + buttons for links + 2 or 3 columns below the header" (and often with something functionally equivalent to a menu bar at the top) is so clearly bootstrap that I don't understand making any effort to hide it.
Certainly, but is your site targeting developers? If not, the average person has no idea what bootstrap is. They will like the site if it has a decent layout and does something useful, fun or solves a problem.
I think you should always strive to make something unique but trying to hide the fact that you built something with bootstrap from people who don't even know what that is seems like a waste of time.
Obviously it isn't advice a designer would take, I feel its meant more from one programmer to another and gives a way to make your demo less stereotypical.
Expressing your 'creativity' is absolutely something you should do in public, because that's the only way you can learn. As a programmer Bootstrap is the easiest way to get an idea, not a product off the ground. So experimenting is awesome. Deviating from that shows that you want to differentiate your work and are actually putting a little thought into the UI. You're also setting up a framework for yourself for next time so you can iterate and make it better.
This experimenting it really what teaches you. Not just design (since you probably aren't doing it right) but how to use technologies like HTML and CSS beyond what is prepackaged for you. And this is key, since a lot of people don't know how to correctly use these, but they can add a few classes and grid layout.
I think design is something that is relatively easy to learn (for a hacker) if it just has to be "good enough" to pass muster with the latest design and UX standards. Certainly something a hacker can learn.
If you are developer, please use it on your next prototype instead of throwing together some html and css.
She ended up with something that didn't look like Bootstrap at the end, with minimal effort and allowing the developer to focus on coding. That was the entire point. And you know what? I wouldn't have picked that particular font, but the end result did not look that bad.
There are a lot of developers working on MVPs here that have absolutely no design sense nor the budget to hire a designer that might find this useful. Just because you don't doesn't mean it's useless, and I find your comment needless. Read the article before commenting, please. It's important. Really, really important.
That's not a good thing.
If you're a designer building an MVP prototype, use Bootstrap as-is or with a pre-made theme. If you're building a real product, hire a designer.
How to make a "half decent" design is not something that I would ever promote in any way, and the fact that anyone promoted this is what's sad. And "half decent" is a very generous description of the work done here.
Giving advice outside your field of expertise is fine. She just happened to give some bad advice.
Our culture's greatest and most universally consistent flashing warning sign regarding the words after it.
Customize Twitter Bootstrap To Not Look Bootstrap-y https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427864 http://antjanus.com/blog/web-design-tips/user-interface-usab...
Saying you're giving lousy advice isn't an excuse for giving lousy advice.
> "I want to make my sites look attractive."
Sure, but you should worry about making them usable and solving a design problem first: how do I best convey the usefulness of this product to its potential users?
> "Design seemed to consist of complicated rules that weren’t written down anywhere, plus an unlearnable sense of taste, possessed only by a black-clad elite."
Design is about solving problems elegantly, I'm tired of fellow programmers rehashing the idea that (interaction) design is like modern art, it couldn't be further from it. But "seemed" makes it sound like that was just the past, how about today?
> "I decided to do my best to hack what it took to make my own projects look vaguely attractive."
Let's make thing "vaguely attractive", that's the ticket.
> "And too often now, I see excellent programming projects that don’t reach the audience they deserve, simply because their design doesn’t match their execution."
Couldn't agree more, except their design is their execution. If you mean to expose your work to the public and fellow professionals, it's your job to make it compelling.
> "I really think that Bootstrap is one of the most significant technical achievements of the last few years: it democratizes the whole process of web design."
Because web design was such a dictatorship until now. Yes, I'm nitpicking, but if you make no effort to learn HTML & CSS, I highly doubt you will by using bootstrap. Why would you? It looks "half decent" enough as it is. I hope I'm wrong.
The rest of the article, as others notes, is not nearly as wrongheaded as its introduction makes it sound. Still, I wish developers would stop trying to "hack" design and actually have the guts to learn it, as designers do with programming.
I've refactored a whole lot of designer code in my day. Let me assure you that this is a two way street.
Here's some combos
I AM a semi-competent coder/designer, and I got a decent amount of new information out of this article. I don't agree with all of it, but I didn't expect to.
Great info, well-presented, easy to understand, make me think. Five stars, would read again.
I'm a developer that sometimes needs to tack a web interface on during the prototype phase. And I use Bootstrap. And I want it to look like Bootstrap. Should the time come for a designer, I'd hope the no frills approach would somewhat convey the desired usability of the app.
This article gave me a few tips - if only a no nonsense guide to using web fonts!
We're supposed to take design advice from a site that looks like a car accident?
No thanks.
Didn't get past the line: "I am not a designer... and I don’t mind Comic Sans."
1) This is the #1 story because people other than you find it interesting.
2) The "hideously-designed" site is merely publishing the author's essay, and is not owned or controlled by the author at all.
3) If you are crying at a Hacker News article which you entirely missed the point of, as did half the other commenters, then you need a walk.
Drew Mclellan was his name.
Dude.
Since we all like MVPs and demo days here, I would think this is applicable to a lot of people on Hacker News. You want to stand apart from the other ten demoing startups that used Bootstrap as well, don't you? Put a little effort in, which is all she is advocating.
Based on the quality of the majority of the comments here it seems like most people opened it, saw the ugly design of the site which is only publishing her work (she didn't design it), made it a few paragraphs in, then ran back to comment about how articles like this are killing our profession, making them ill, making them cry, or how she shouldn't be giving design advice.
Dreadful. Truly dreadful. You're better people than this.
Do you not see the irony?
We are visual creatures, we judge a book by its cover (and the only time we don't do that is if we know the author or it's recommended to us) That site reminded me of Geocities (though not as bad), I'm already put off from reading it. That was my first impression. But with so many comments, I forced myself to read through it.
With a bad taste in the reader's mouth, they start off immediately with a negative impression, which could explain why a lot of negative comments.
My issue is that the author thinks half an hour is sufficient enough to make a their site look 'half-decent' or make it non-boot strap like. As a non-designer, it's not that easy. Her points are valid though, just a lil optimistic with the time.
Another easy way to make it non boot strap like is get rid of the gradient on the buttons. Go flat with a border, ala Google Style.
(Edit: typo)
I'd suggest removing all the 'complicated' layering effect and transparencies. Even hovers over the year links are creating transparencies on the article text. Just leave the article text area 100% opaque, lighten the background to improve contrast. I want to read easily and not off a weave basket.
There is a tad too much variation/combo of the colors used. You have red and grey (which is good) but you have a gazillion shades of it (not good) and you have them alternating roles, ie: red text, red box, grey text, grey box, dark grey text, dark grey box - tighten your color usage. Since your colors usage are everywhere, there's no accent color. (Like I can't tell which color is used to declare text links since all text colors can be text links)
The red is a very strong color - and since author box is in red, it's competing with the article for attention (the article should be the main focus. But it doesn't mean you should make the article box red.)
Move Date under Year (navigation) or move the year next to date - don't make the readers' eyes/brain work, trying to correlate the 2.
Don't show links that aren't clickable and will never have content. ie: Year 1999 etc. Just start from 2005.
Overall the page is super busy with its big range of color shades, layering with transparencies and confusing visual hierarchy/navigation.
So don't tone it down too much. You can't please everyone, and there's a big design echo-chamber on here. And actually, on second thought, maybe I wouldn't change it at all. Be bold and distinctive. Own it. Design isn't about toning stuff down to the lowest common denominator.
And I love the ease of navigation provided by the top year bar and side day bar.
The longer I look at the desktop version, the more I like it, but my first reaction was not good. It's too much. (I'm a hacker, not a designer, btw)
It's just far too busy. There's a white button title on top of a semi-transparent gray button which is on top of a darker gray background which is on top of big red letters which are on top of some sort of weird faux-paper diagonal strips. It's like there was an explosion in the layer factory, and it increases the effort needed to actually read the text beyond what I'm willing to put in.
I think your site is visually striking, but it's a wee bit busy for me. That's all.
2. It still looks like bootstrap. Telling people, "use bootstrap, but quickly change the fonts and colors and maybe add some images" isn't helpful. I wouldn't mind an article outlining how to use LESS to make bootstrap not look like bootstrap (which would involve, at a minimum, not using a 12-column grid, because I associate that with bootstrap more than anything else). And that seems like something developers should be interested in.
3. There are an ungodly number of blog posts that say, "use bootstrap, but change the fonts etc so that it doesn't look like bootstrap." The specific details: "use textures" for example, made the example site look worse, so it's hard to see what this article added.
In other words, get of your high horse.
I've used Bootstrap as a starting point for several apps and have modified the grid setup before, but it wasn't because I thought it looked like Bootstrap.
And that's all fine, because it gives these pages a standard structure so that they're easy to navigate and I wouldn't suggest that people change it just for its own sake. If there's a good reason to change it, definitely do it, but otherwise leave it alone.
I'm not anti-bootstrap and, to my untrained eye, it encourages pretty good design. My only point is that it takes a lot more than changing fonts and colors to make a website look not-bootstrappy, so one should only make the changes and tweaks that have a specific purpose. Changing the colors to match other websites within the same organization makes sense, but changing the colors because, to quote the article, "that button and that menu still both look awfully Bootstrappy" doesn't make sense, unless you are a designer.
Granted.
> 2. It still looks like bootstrap.
To you and me.
> I wouldn't mind an article outlining how to use LESS to make bootstrap not look like bootstrap (which would involve, at a minimum, not using a 12-column grid, because I associate that with bootstrap more than anything else). And that seems like something developers should be interested in.
Please write it.
Also: 24 Ways' design has, and has had, an excellent design for years and years. The colors are a bit interesting, but the typography and layout is wonderful.
Also also: you're building quite the straw man there. No one said the article was killing anything, illing anything, or making anyone cry.
I definitely wouldn't take the author's design advice, though.
jspthrowaway2 was paraphrasing other comments on this page. When this article was newer, all of the top comments where about how terrible the design is. Here are some direct quotes from other comments on this story:
> the fact that this person is trying to promote this exact idea makes me ill
> I'm crying. Why is this the #1 story? And how can a person with such a hideous looking site give design advice?
> We're supposed to take design advice from a site that looks like a car accident? No thanks.
Suffice to say, this thread is reflecting pretty badly on you as a person and you should reconsider your attitude.
Regardless, I'm done here. I'd be happy to have a civil discussion on the matter, but it's clear you're not capable. Passive-aggressively calling me sexist while hiding behind a throwaway account is trolling, plain and simple, and tolerating you isn't worth my time.
There was no passive aggressive accusation made; I simultaneously shared with you what came to mind when I read your comment, then gave you the benefit that you weren't being that low. Read for comprehension, please. I'm just sharing with you my thought process on your original comment, which was entirely out of line. I'm not making that up: my first thought was "this reaction is due to her gender, isn't it?" which tells you how far out of line it was. That's the only reason I'm sharing it. Slow down, guilty conscience; I'm not accusing you of sexism.
I cycle through throwaways so that I don't reflect awfully upon myself as a person when someone misunderstands me as intentionally and flagrantly as you have. See, now, I know never to consider you as a designer on any project I ever do, based on your elitism and how you've behaved in this thread. I have a $20 in my wallet that says I'm not the only one, I'm just being vocal about it. That should be important to you, since you're a freelancer. You don't get the same privilege with me, which is why I prefer anonymity.
> trolling
Har. I get accused of this a lot, and I'm starting to read it as "yeah? well? your mom!" in my head. If I were trolling you, you wouldn't know it and certainly wouldn't be able to accuse me of it. I think it's because people are surprised I have the audacity to tell them what's wrong with them, and it makes them uncomfortable; so, by default, I must be an evil troll.
The rest of Hacker News upvoted my comment -- basically a direct shot at you and the other mediocre designers that were made uncomfortable by this article, and the most upvoted on any account I've ever had (what does that tell you?) -- and even after reading it you ran back into this thread being an elitist jerk to everybody who was trying to have a productive conversation about the article. You, and elitist people like you in any walk of life, are cancerous, and I'm investing time telling you that so you can stop doing it. Stop doing it.
But, that said, I think it would have been better without everything between the font change and the color scheme change removed. For example, the icon is an additional unnecessary visual element- either use text or an icon- if you have both it means that one or the other is insufficient on their own and that is a bad design smell -> simplify! Textures are ok, but a bad example- the only change I could tell was the missing horizontal rules/grey lines. The alpine background- meh, even for a ski lodge- this isn't a cheesy blog. The CSS change I could barely tell.
No, you need to avoid demonstrating the opposite of what you're setting out to teach at the very first moment. Don't put an obvious SQL injection in the form that leads to your article on web security. Don't use a hyperactive loudmouth to promote your massage therapy business. And don't put an article about web design on a site that hurts the eyes.
Is it her fault? I guess not, although I imagine she knew what the site looked like even if she didn't actually design it. Does it mean that the content is worthless? Of course not. Is it a huge red flag that really should not be there? Oh yes.
Though I have dabbled with CSS and know the basics I am basically design challenged. This article helps a lot.
thanks
Perhaps I should've spoken about how I think half an hour is cutting it a bit tight.
Perhaps I should've mentioned that the background-image idea isn't too smart, as it leaves too much room for erring with non-fitting imagery. That's part of what designers do: they know what fits together - you shouldn't expect programmers to be able to do that. And if you're really set on educating programmers, maybe talk about the background-image's colors, composition or contrast. Or maybe suggest a totally blurred image or something gimmicky that will make it an "instant hit".
Perhaps I should've mentioned that making bootstrap not look like bootstrap in half an hour, inevitably means that you're going to end up with a lesser product. Bootstrap has been designed from the bottom up. You either use that and it's default features, or end up with a hybrid that looks like you "tried to make a half-decent site in half an hour".
But thanks for the rage points there. I wonder if I could make up some points by posting "I'm a fan" elsewhere.
Now you know.
(I mean: I'm pretty new to the community, so thanks for the heads up. Live 'n learn, right?)