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Comment by 54mf | Hacker News Reader

"I am a programmer. I am not a designer."

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.

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Please don't be so harsh on the author.

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.

So no-one should share advice or tips they have learnt to help them get by in a field that isn't their primary profession?

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.

Perhaps I'm being nostalgic, but 24 Ways is sacred to me. It's a yearly list featuring the best-of-the-best sharing insight in to their specific areas of expertise. Christian Heilmann on localStorage (http://24ways.org/2010/html5-local-storage/), for example. This article feels way below the bar; at least, the bar I have set for the site in my own head.

I'm not sure how this article falls below the bar. It's packed with design resources that programmers can use to make clean, not-ugly sites in very little time.

It seems clear that there are some mediocre designers out there who feel threatened by this.

As a mediocre designer, I'm threatened by great designers, not awful ones. Nice shot, though.

The author is a developer, not a designer. And I don't see the point of trying to persuade people to not listen to her because she's among the awful designers although they already say they find her writing useful.

That's my site. I'm glad you're a fan - thank you.

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.

Just wanted to say thanks to you and your contributers over the years. I always thought 24 articles in 24 days was a very ambitious idea but somehow you guys always deliver the magic.

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!

Just so you know, I read the article, liked it and have it saved to follow up on later today. I'm a programmer not a designer.

Thanks for getting it out there.

> Arbitrarily adding fonts, colors, and background images take a perfectly usable layout and make it look like something straight out of 2002.

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.

I don't think the effort is so much to hide it as it is to make the site more your own.

> But, at the end of the day, the webpage is still obviously twitter bootstrap with a few tweaks

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.

It's only clearly Bootstrap to people who have heard of Bootstrap. 99.999% of your visitors will never have heard of Bootstrap, will never have heard the word 'framework.'

That's not true. I'm not a designer or a developer, but I recognized sites that in retrospect clearly used bootstrap well before I heard about it. The hero bar, buttons for links, and (usually) three explanatory columns are pretty distinctive design elements even to people who don't use the tool.

I don't think that the author is saying to "un-design" at all. She's saying to use a basic framework as a starting point and learn how to make it your own. Adding the fonts/colors/images that you feel add to the site are your own creativity and a way to break away from the typical Bootstrap site that is commonly used today.

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.

I'm going to sound like a dick for saying this, but I'm okay with it: most people's "creativity" shouldn't be expressed in a public way. Breaking away from Bootstrap and making it "less stereotypical" is probably a bad idea unless you know what you're doing. It's like putting a bejeweled, glittery case on an iPhone; yeah, it's "your creativity", but please don't.

I think you're missing the point.

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.

>Then perhaps you shouldn't be giving design advice.

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.

Design is not easy to learn, for anyone, and the article did little to teach design. It offered sources for finding fonts, and finding textures, with little advice about what makes a good or poor font choice, or when and why textures work.

Yeah I mean this is really not good design, at all. And I'm so strongly against the idea of using bootstrap as a "hey slap this on my site and now i don't need to worry about design anymore!" type tool -- the fact that this person is trying to promote this exact idea makes me ill. Please HN community, we should value good design. It's really important. Really, important.

Last I checked, the title of this article was How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour, not A Complete Guide to Good Design. The subtext of that, which she talks about in the text, is that even for a developer with no design sense it doesn't take much effort to make Bootstrap not look like Bootstrap.

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.

"She ended up with something that didn't look like Bootstrap at the end..."

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.

Latest response ever, but wow what an awful reply. As tempted as I am to go over this and pick apart every way that this is a bad and inaccurate reply, it's not worth it. So here is a summary my overall feelings, to clarify my original comment:

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.

Twitter bootstrap makes prototypes usable. It does not replace good design on a product, and no one claims that.

If you are developer, please use it on your next prototype instead of throwing together some html and css.

> Then perhaps you shouldn't be giving design advice.

Giving advice outside your field of expertise is fine. She just happened to give some bad advice.

That's why I said perhaps. :)

> All due respect but

Our culture's greatest and most universally consistent flashing warning sign regarding the words after it.

Yeah, it's similar to starting a sentence with "I don't mean to sound racist, but..." Because at that point you know for a fact that they will say something racist.

The author is a programmer and writer, and I absolutely respect that. All due respect for her accomplishments, but I don't think she should be writing about design.

Actually, no. I meant it. The author is a programmer and writer who has received attention for her work in both areas, and I absolutely respect that. I simply disagree with her offering design advice.

The good old I-didn't-find-it-useful-so-no-one-will perspective. Clearly you didn't bother to understand the purpose or the intended audience for the article. The title spells it out. There's tons of articles that discuss design elements, but very few that give practical advice on how to quickly hack together a presentable site.

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