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Comment by mfrye0 | Hacker News Reader

I've done frontend for quite awhile. I usually start with some sort of framework for every project and use only the minimal pieces for the foundation.

Generally you need the same stuff for every site:

  - reset/normalize the styling cross browser
  - basic grid system
  - typography, forms, and buttons
  - "componentized" files with variables (sass, less, post css, etc)

Basically I start with a custom build of whatever framework, use that to build the MVP, then customize it according to the designer requirements. Lastly, I'll pull in components as I need them.

Why reinvent the wheel and start from scratch?

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But is that grid system consistent across different sites? In my experience, I usually need to customize the "grid" to specific breakpoints and widths, as defined by designs/content. I find that it's often faster to just write a few helper classes for layout – specific to the site I'm working on – rather than use 15% of a framework's grid and still do heavy lifting. Of course, this isn't the case if the design team designs with a framework's grid system/breakpoints in mind.

I made the grid of Picnic CSS very flexible to be able to do that, what do you think? :)

https://picnicss.com/documentation#grids

In exchange it makes the framework a bit heavy (~10kb), but if you use the CSS these can be modified and optimized as seen here: https://github.com/franciscop/picnic/blob/master/src/plugins...

Edit: this is the independent experiment I did before merging the grid system into Picnic, which I think it's still quite cool:

https://francisco.io/flexpoint/

For sure. Like I said, I usually do a custom build of a framework, then strip out the stuff I don't need. And if it's designed with variables, changing small stuff like breakpoints etc is maybe a few quick changes.

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