Timing sometimes can be a strange thing, it can be nice when it works in your favour.
Just as I’ve started creating my own web UI toolkit, I get the news that Twitter open sourced their toolkit called Bootstrap. The timing couldn’t be any better for me, for the following reasons:
- A few months ago I had come to the conclusion that 960 Grid System was a great choice for structuring web pages in a scalable manner
- I’ve checked out lots of resources for creating nice looking page style elements, via Mashable, and I have yet to find the one “killer toolkit”. So, I’ve been reluctantly looking to make my own – with my non-existing front-end design skills, that was going to be exciting
- Two of the projects that I am working on at the moment have now got embryonic style elements, it was time to dress them up a bit
So you can imagine the smile on my face as I went through Twitter’s blog this morning. Technical folks can’t design UI, and that’s good news for everybody. The trouble is though, technical people are often allowed to make UI design decisions, often for the lack of a better alternative (or awareness). With a toolkit like Twitter’s Bootstrap, I think those of us who can’t afford their own front-end design teams would hugely benefit by simply adopting it. The worse effect that this have may be to help reduce the amount of frankly “offending site designs” that hit the web regularly.