Saw a pattern at a coffee shop in Austin last week

Three different teams all came in with their laptops open to the same crappy bootstrap grid and none of them had customized a single spacer. Has anyone else noticed agencies just copying each other's broken systems instead of building their own?

2 comments

2 Comments

mitchell.shane6d ago

@mark_fisher48 makes a fair point about time crunch, but software like Bootstrap exists so you don't have to rebuild the wheel every time. The issue isn't the grid itself, it's that nobody audits what they copy. Most teams just grab a starter template and run with it without fixing the bad defaults first. A quick pass to tighten up the margin values takes like an hour.

mark_fisher487d ago

You see this all the time in Austin actually. I worked at three different agencies over the last five years and every single one used the same base bootstrap template with maybe a color swap. The real problem is that nobody wants to take the time to build a proper design system from scratch because clients expect fast turnarounds. So teams just grab whatever worked on the last project and paste it into the new one. It creates this cycle where everyone is copying bad spacing and layout choices instead of fixing them. My advice is to spend one afternoon auditing your own grid values and set hard rules for padding and margins before you touch any project. It saves so much headache later.