Show HN: Bootswatch, free swatches for your Bootstrap site

http://bootswatch.com

by parkov • 14 years ago

407 53 14 years ago

bootswatch.com

quan4• 14 years ago

Wow, what a coincidence! I just created a very similar project http://www.lavishbootstrap.com/

How did you generate the different themes, and are they stored in different css/less files?

parkov2• 14 years ago

Cool project! I ended up doing most of it by hand. I started by just playing around with variables.less, but it wasn't giving me the variety I wanted, so I added an extra less file for more custom stuff.

You can check them out on the gh-pages branch in GitHub: https://github.com/thomaspark/bootswatch

creatom2• 14 years ago

You website gives an error.

quan4• 14 years ago

Bad idea posting to HN with only 1 dyno, I cached the default color scheme so homepage should load a lot faster now.

ed209• 14 years ago

nice work. I think you could tune this a bit more to pick the right colours for the right elements, bad contrast and clashing colours sometimes appear. but nice effort, bookmarked :)

quan4• 14 years ago

thanks, some intelligent way to automatically assign colors would be nice. May be I'll look at colors brightness and hue. For now, you can manually reassign them if the generated theme doesn't work.

kcima• 14 years ago

Original post is cool, but has only 6 color schemes.

I really like how your site generates a bootstrap color theme from an image of your choice.. works very well.

brador• 14 years ago

I really like this, maybe add some more sample images, the ones that are there don't work so well...

ilcavero• 14 years ago

very cool site you should be the one in front page, do you get the colors out of the picture at random or you do some analysis to assign the darkest color to the background or something similar?

systemsoverload• 14 years ago

If you want to get insta-front-paged, you should look into some kind of hooks into adobe kuler themes...

jentulman• 14 years ago

Very nice, I just tried feeding it a few recent penny-arcade strips (I've always like their colouring) and it' thrown back some nice choices.

rrrhys• 14 years ago

This is fantastic, you should make a submission so it gets the credit it deserves.

I'm terrible at creating nice colour-sets and looking forward to making my bootstrap based projects less 'out of the box' looking.

redslazer• 14 years ago

That looks really amazing, i have also tried a couple of pictures and it works really well.

I was wondering if it would be possible to share a link with the picture attached allready, so you could show the theme to other people easily?

quan4• 14 years ago

Just append image_url parameter like this: http://www.lavishbootstrap.com/?image_url=http://farm2.stati...

mattmaroon• 14 years ago

That's awesome and deserves a post of its own. I'd love to see a feature that let you preview some dummy site with the theme you generate.

josscrowcroft2• 14 years ago

Combine with http://design-seeds.com/ for maximum "hell yeah"

e.g.: http://www.lavishbootstrap.com/?image_url=http://design-seed...

nrbafna• 14 years ago

I had been putting away the idea of doing for several weekends now.

Great implementation.

creatom2• 14 years ago

Just awesome, that's exactly what Bootstrap was missing! I hope your project will grow big, good luck!

P.S. That would be even cooler if there were more dark themes.

thehodge• 14 years ago

This is fantastic and just what bootstrap needs to stop people complaining about all the bootstrap sites looking the same.. I hope this stays on the frontpage a while so more people can find out and contribute..

radagaisus• 14 years ago

Nice work. thanks!

jsavimbi• 14 years ago

That's really nice, thank you. All I did was download the file and replaced my existing bootstrap.min.css with it and it works great.

mcobrien• 14 years ago

This is great! One minor thing I noticed is that on the homepage, the bottom three swatches don't seem to link to individual files properly -- they all download the bootstrap.min.css, regardless of what you choose in the split button.

PaulAnunda• 14 years ago

this is awesome, thanks for the contribution!

joshmanders4• 14 years ago

What would be awesome is a way to select all custom colors and build a unique bootstrap swatch right on the site with live preview, like http://bytefluent.com/vivify/ does for VIM color schemes.

jonny_eh• 14 years ago

This is very very cool.

It'd be even cooler if users could customize the themes right on the site, but that's probably obvious and not easy to implement.

moe2• 14 years ago

At the current pace of the bootstrap ecosystem I wouldn't be surprised to see that announced here on HN within the next couple weeks...

rvenugopal12• 14 years ago

This is awesome. I presume this is targeted at Bootstrap 2.0. Correct? One question I have is, how do you plan to deal with changing versions of Bootstrap. Just so I understand, are you recommending dropping the chosen variables.less along with bootstrap less files to compile it?

Thanks

parkov2• 14 years ago

Yes, it's targeting 2.0. Both the CSS and LESS files will be kept in sync with Bootstrap. So you won't need to compile anything, just download the latest swatch CSS.

rvenugopal12• 14 years ago

I didn't see a target bootstrap version at http://bootswatch.com/spacelab/bootstrap.min.css

Hence, I assumed that we had to compile the less files. Also, not everyone will be willing to move to the latest version of bootstrap.

It might be easier to let github manage the multiple versions with a download page similar to this https://github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/downloads .

Personally, I don't mind doing the extra step of lessc if I can get exactly what I want. Thanks for the effort.

railsmax• 14 years ago

That's really cool!!! Thanks a lot !!!

tormentor2• 14 years ago

Awesome! Soon all our sites will look like bootstrap but now with a variety of different colors. THANKS!! CSS is so hard.

tormentor2• 14 years ago

lmfao your all idiots. this is why stupid shit like this makes it to the top. im going to reddit

joshmanders4• 14 years ago

Heaven forbid something helpful to the community and makes it easier to get something useful to a level of eye pleasing is a wrong thing.

Blocks8• 14 years ago

Nice site. I bookmarked it but it would be cool to sign up for a email when there are new themes available. A very passive way to stay top of mind.

Thanks for creating this!

stdbrouw• 14 years ago

It's interesting to see Bootstrap is slowly turning into what jQuery UI was always supposed to be.

vyrotek2• 14 years ago

Agreed. The current state of jQuery UI is what pushed me to consider other frameworks such as Dojo (which I'm really enjoying). I've also started using Bootstrap on a new project and really like it as well. I just need more components! :)

whatusername• 14 years ago

Do you know of a good alternative to jqui Sortable? That's the only reason I still keep it around for a couple of projects.

mitchellmckenna• 14 years ago

What are some of the components you think it's missing?

moe2• 14 years ago

I find it doubly interesting since bootstrap isn't even very good code (albeit slowly improving). Completeness, documentation and brand name really trump technical excellence here.

Either way, it's great to have one of these frameworks finally pick up steam, that's been long overdue!

aoe• 14 years ago

Don't know why you got downvoted. Bootstrap definitely isn't near jQuery UI's code quality/documentation.

alanmeaney• 14 years ago

Thanks Thomas, this is great. Really wanted to customize bootstrap for a demo site for a project I'm working on and your Spacelab swatch is perfect, saved me loads of time. I'll drop you a mail for a peak when it's live, should be in the next week or so.

wildmXranat• 14 years ago

As a developer, I'm not kidding when I say that Bootstrap and related projects made it feel like perpetual Christmas. Thanks mate!

joshmanders4• 14 years ago

Agreed whole heartily.

pinchyfingers• 14 years ago

My life keeps getting better. Thanks you, Thomas and Quan, both. I always leave the front-end work for last because design is ridiculously more difficult than coding. Guys like your are easing the anxiety I feel every time I start trying to figure out colors, fonts, layout, etc.

josscrowcroft2• 14 years ago

I love the concept - my only problem with it is that the six starter themes (swatches) featured on the site aren't really attractive enough, more like failed experiments... it could benefit from a design-off where popular designers create a swatch with their own take on the Bootstrap, and submit it to the site...

PS: Overheard on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/bcherry/status/169960949967626241):

New web dev trend: "Yo dawg I heard you like Bootstrap so I made bootstrap for your Bootstrap so you can bootstrap while you Bootstrap."

arturadib• 14 years ago

More and more folks are realizing the power of Open Source - why limit it to functional code when we all need design just as much? This is a fantastic trend, and (I hope) just the beginning.

corroded• 14 years ago

Isn't this almost the same as this?

wrapbootstrap.com/themes

which was featured a couple of days ago? Maybe you could submit your "swatches" as themes and earn a couple of bucks :)

mobytea• 14 years ago

great stuff, lavishbootstrap is great too. hope that maybe the kuler color schema or the colourlovers api get inside!

Show HN: Bootswatch, free swatches for your Bootstrap site

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