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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I like that this is basically a customisation of Bootstrap. As much as it's nice for designers and engineers to build a design system from scratch, Bootstrap is a mature, well designed codebase, and you can do a lot worse than using a customised version as the basis for a company specific design system.

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I was about to post the same comment, but want to add that I think Bootstrap v5 has reached a really nice point with a mix of the original component based vision but utilising the utility class based construction inspired by Tailwind.

v5.2 also moved a lot of the SCSS variables to CSS vars which is much nicer to work with.

Interested if you could elaborate on this, as someone who’s never used Bootstrap as I don’t really see the point if you are implementing a custom design anyway. What is the elevator pitch for basing this on Bootstrap?

Familiarity. You can achieve a cleaner, lighter and more focused CSS/SCSS codebase without it, but people know Bootstrap and it's quick and easy for them.

- When the design changes again, you don't have to rewrite all the code.

- You can use this across different web technologies.

- You can use with off the shelf component libraries.

When creating a new design system you need to cover at least:

1. CSS architecture, making all the components inter-compatible with each other (very complex).

2. Accessibility.

3. Browser compatibility and responsiveness/mobile capabilities.

3. What components are you going to provide?

4. Documentation for the team using it.

5. Fixing all the bugs in it.

6. The _actual design_.

Bootstrap pretty much gives you 1-6. It makes decisions that are easy to criticise if you've got the resources of a big tech company behind you, but for most people, customising Bootstrap will let them focus on #7 and get all the rest pretty much done for them.

There are alternatives, taking any of the major CSS frameworks like this that has customisation built in will work, Foundation is another good one, but Bootstrap has a lot of the mindshare.

We've built custom UI Components from scratch. Millions in development resources. I miss Bootstrap. Never understood why it became fashionable to hate on it.

I saw some of the "hate" (strong word) at my previous job, and it pretty much boiled down to 3 things:

- Bootstrap JQuery

- Not going all-in on customisation with the built-in customisation options, but rather hacking on custom styles on top in our own stylesheets.

- Starting from Bootstrap 3.

I suspect that much of the hate stems from things like this.

you nailed it. Bootstrap has very powerful customization options if you're willing to invest some time learning scss config files.

Did you mean Bootstrap gives you 1-5 and you can focus on #6 or do I not understand what #7 is?

The numbering is off, there's a duplicate 3.

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