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Honest question. Wouldn't you be better off constructing your own style architecture for an application so complex it requires React? I imagine using any prebui

Honest question. Wouldn't you be better off constructing your own style architecture for an application so complex it requires React? I imagine using any prebuilt UI framework out of the box becomes restrictive with the necessity to constantly rewrite styles to match whatever the design team wants. I'm just curious to hear how teams use things like this.

Klathmon 10y ago
I found we really didn't have to rewrite anything big. The components that are given are "building blocks" Buttons, "cards", dialogs, text input fields, etc... Once you get them, you can just override the color, size, shape, and sometimes a few other little things and it "just works". So I don't need to worry about getting an input box to correctly style on all platforms, I don't need to come up with the animations and JS to make the fancy "floating input field" or the inky splash effects or the 2-step shadows. That's also why the issue around styling these things is so contentious. It's a major way that you'll be interacting with them, and with the way CSS works it's not easy to "overwrite" default styles without using !important which feels like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg.
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  Interesting. I agree, not having to reinvent wheels is always good. In my experience there's a lot to fight with frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap, and even Material. If you're all in philosophically then I suppose there wouldn't be much to change, but if you disagree on certain UI principles there's going to be rough times ahead.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    I think the difference is that in our case we were looking for handholding, and a UI toolkit gave us that. We aren't designers, and being developers we have a tendency to nitpick which is only worse when the subject is just outside our area of expertise... Picking a design "platform" and using a toolkit to implement it pretty much stopped most of that in it's tracks and let us focus on the actual application. It's obviously not for everyone, but it was exactly what we wanted and needed.

Klathmon 10y ago

I found we really didn't have to rewrite anything big. The components that are given are "building blocks" Buttons, "cards", dialogs, text input fields, etc... Once you get them, you can just override the color, size, shape, and sometimes a few other little things and it "just works". So I don't need to worry about getting an input box to correctly style on all platforms, I don't need to come up with the animations and JS to make the fancy "floating input field" or the inky splash effects or the 2-step shadows. That's also why the issue around styling these things is so contentious. It's a major way that you'll be interacting with them, and with the way CSS works it's not easy to "overwrite" default styles without using !important which feels like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg.

ryanSrich 10y ago
Interesting. I agree, not having to reinvent wheels is always good. In my experience there's a lot to fight with frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap, and even Material. If you're all in philosophically then I suppose there wouldn't be much to change, but if you disagree on certain UI principles there's going to be rough times ahead.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  I think the difference is that in our case we were looking for handholding, and a UI toolkit gave us that. We aren't designers, and being developers we have a tendency to nitpick which is only worse when the subject is just outside our area of expertise... Picking a design "platform" and using a toolkit to implement it pretty much stopped most of that in it's tracks and let us focus on the actual application. It's obviously not for everyone, but it was exactly what we wanted and needed.